Space flights and slimness: Y2K feminism is back

There was a moment not long ago when feminism felt dangerous again. When the #MeToo movement wasn’t just a hashtag but a reckoning. When Black women led uprisings in Ferguson, Minneapolis, and across the globe, demanding not just inclusion but justice. When protest lines stretched for blocks, and the phrase “intersectionality” wasn’t corporate jargon, but a rallying cry. It felt, for a brief and potent time, like the world might tip in a new direction.

But culture has a way of tightening its grip in the face of upheaval. That’s the moment we’re living in now – a backlash moment. And few symbols crystallise that regression more neatly than the recent Blue Origin spaceflight, a cosmetic display of billionaire-backed “empowerment” featuring a roster of thin, camera-ready women, including Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez, suspended in weightlessness for 11 heavily branded minutes.

This was not a revolution. This was restoration. A return to the sleek, depoliticised girlboss feminism of the early 2000s – feminism as optics, as marketing strategy, as aspirational individualism.

In 2009, Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to Lean In – to sit at the tables of power, stop saying sorry, and grab opportunities like men. It was a feminism made for Davos panels and LinkedIn posts. And now, in 2025, it has been launched into literal orbit, burnished with glitter and lash extensions aboard a billionaire’s space rocket.

Blue Origin’s recent all-female spaceflight wasn’t just a PR stunt. It was a distress signal from the centre of a feminism that has lost its radical edge. Like Ozempic slipping into the bloodstream of celebrity culture, this space mission is a potent symbol of how much gender politics have regressed since #MeToo in 2017 – back to the early 2000s, when girl power meant buying stilettos and breaking ceilings for rich white corporate women within the boardroom, rather than burning the whole thing down.

Last month, the Facebook memoir Careless People by Sarah Wyn Williams further exposed the lie of Lean In feminism, showing how Sandberg herself judged and penalised mothers in the workplace and expected corporate women to do what she did: rely on women of colour to mind her children while she told other white women that it was possible to have it all. Sure – if you can act like the boys long enough to afford it. The same philosophy goes for Blue Origin: if you can afford to enter the boys’ club and if you behave, other rich women will applaud you for your so-called contributions to feminism.

Let’s be clear: the Blue Origin flight was sold as a feminist triumph. It was not. It was a spectacle of privilege dressed in the aesthetic of empowerment, a $22 million joyride into the upper atmosphere, designed not for scientific advancement or equitable representation but for branding, visibility, and vibes. This isn’t the stuff of revolution. This is Lean In with a rocket booster.

This regression to 2000s-era feminism isn’t isolated to outer space. It’s mirrored down here on Earth by the sudden, violent swing back to the cult of thinness. After a brief, imperfect moment of body inclusivity in the 2010s, Ozempic and Mounjaro have ushered in a new age of medically sanctioned weight-loss obsession, reanimating the aesthetic values of the 90s and 2000s obsession with thinness, that shamed people like Jessica Simpson, called the 136lb Bridget Jones pop culture’s fat girl, and spawned a generation of women with body image issues and disordered eating.

This regression is not a coincidence, it is backlash. Historically, the resurgence of skinny ideals has aligned with moments when women threaten to become too loud, too powerful, too disruptive. During the Victorian era, thinness was coded as discipline and morality; women were expected to suppress both hunger and sexuality. Today, amid rising feminist consciousness and mass political unrest, we’re seeing the same logic repackaged for the Instagram age.

Ozempic culture doesn’t just sell a slimmer body, it sells smallness as virtue. As women become more aware of systemic violence – from reproductive rollbacks to economic precarity – the demand for their silence, passivity, and self-surveillance returns with force. It’s easier to control a woman who’s too tired to eat. It’s easier to celebrate feminism when it’s aesthetic, apolitical, and tightly cinched at the waist.

The Blue Origin spectacle and the rise of pharmaceutical thinness are symptoms of the same disease: a cultural retreat from collective empowerment into carefully branded, tightly controlled, visually appealing performances of progress.

In a time when abortion rights have been rolled back, trans women are being legislated out of public life, research and public policy in the U.S. even including the word “women” or “diversity” has been shredded, climate disaster disproportionately affects women in the Global South, and over half of Palestinians who have been killed since October 2023 are women and children, Blue Origin offers a parody of liberation. While girls in Afghanistan are banned from education and Black women in Mississippi die from a lack of reproductive care, Bezos has turned space into an influencer platform. And we’re meant to applaud? This is not liberation – it is marketing. It is lipstick on a launchpad.

Worse, it’s distraction. As with the rise of the ‘tradwife’ trend and the millions of women who voted for Trump, today’s culture war is as much about re-domesticating women as it is about erasing our agency. Blue Origin’s glamourised, consumerist feminism becomes the ideal cover: a feel-good moment to obscure the grim realities of growing inequality and authoritarian drift.

The Blue Origin flight is not remarkable because it exists in isolation – it is remarkable because it doesn’t. It’s one piece in a larger tapestry of regression masquerading as progress. It is feminism styled for social media and sponsored by the richest man on Earth. It’s a mission that pretends to inspire girls into STEM, while real women in science fight for funding, for recognition, for child care, for spacesuits that fit.

Like Lean In before it, this is a feminism designed to assimilate women into elite spaces, not to transform them. And just like Lean In, it collapses under scrutiny. Because the vast majority of women will never be invited aboard. And even if they were, what would they change?

The space tourism industry, like corporate boardrooms, thrives on extraction. Of labour. Of resources. Of image. The Blue Origin flight extracted feminism’s aesthetics – diversity, visibility, “girl power” – and left behind its politics.

There is deep fear in the establishment about what might happen if women, especially women of colour and trans women, organise and inspire with real power. That fear has always been met with containment – of bodies, of voices, of ambitions. Today, containment is cultural. It looks like the return of the ultra-thin body. It looks like diet pills with rebranded names. It looks like the rejection of trans women and strict policing of the gender binary. It looks like racists and fascists openly spewing bigotry and arresting activists and immigrants. It looks like the TikTok marketing of tradwives as aspirational. It looks like lash extensions in space, sold as activism. It looks like choice feminism, where your choices only count if they’re legible to capitalism.

The return of the skinny, silent, well-dressed woman is not just fashion nostalgia, it is social control. We’re being told, once again, to be smaller. More agreeable. Less angry. More controllable.

The Blue Origin flight is not the problem, it’s the emblem. The beacon warning us that the systems we hoped to dismantle are not only intact but reasserting themselves with fresh lipstick and clever slogans. But we’ve been here before. And we’ve learned.

We know that true liberation won’t come from a billionaire’s rocket. It won’t come from diet drugs or clickbait headlines or a seat at the table built by men who never meant to share it. It won’t trickle down. It will only come from the ground up – from coalitions, from mutual care, from fighting together. The revolution was televised. Then it was co-opted. Now it’s being sold back to us as a limited-edition capsule collection, curated for space. We must say no. We must reclaim feminism from the orbit of capital, from the grips of thinness, whiteness, and wealth. We must stop mistaking altitude for progress. Because no woman is free until we all are. And no revolution that fits in a rocket capsule will ever get us there.

Feminism must be revolutionary, not symbolic. It must build from the ground up, not trickle down from a rocket’s apex. It must ask who is left behind, not who gets the front-row selfie. And it must always, always challenge the systems that benefit from keeping most women small – in body, in voice, and in power.

In the end, the Blue Origin flight didn’t launch women into the future. It sent us hurtling back to a version of feminism that was never built to include us all. And we’re not going back.