March was Women’s History Month. And April 2025 now is a time for watching Katy Perry and Oprah’s best friend go to space and pretend they are making significant history. A private company – a.k.a. Jeff Bezos, who, since he owns Amazon, basically owns many of our worlds – wanted to send celebrities to space.
Some headlines called out an L. Sanchez before they moved on to the “Other Women” who went to space, including Oprah bestie Gayle King. I read too quickly and got the name wrong. And so I thought: Leslie Sanchez! I haven’t run into her in a while. (I used to off and on in D.C. But many of us are still roaming around less since Covid.) She’s always so pleasant. She wrote for us now and again when I was editor of NRO.
Nope, not Leslie. Lauren Sánchez.
It took me a moment.
And then I remembered the inauguration and the most unmissable non-blouse.
But it was another body part that Katy Perry wanted us all to know about, adding “glam” “a****” to space. And while up higher earlier today for all of eleven minutes, she says she connected with the divine feminine or Divine Feminine, which I suspect is different than what Pope John Paul II referred to as feminine genius.
Feminine genius was not on display for the Blue Origin flight to space and back; some of the conversations around it and onboard might have been an audition for the Real Housewives Miles-High Club. Nor was it when Taylor Lorenz, who didn’t go to space, referred in an interview on Sunday to alleged murderer Luigi Mangione as a “handsome,” “smart,” “moral man.” (Take it away, Jim Geraghty.) I promise you, ladies, you do not have to settle for a man who is charged with murdering a husband and father. Our culture has its rot, but it’s not dead yet.
But we do need women to want men who are better than that — and then some. And who want better than women who pay money to pretend to do something historic. Katy Perry said she was “super-connected to love” in space. We need women who know better where to look, or we will all find ourselves lost in space before too long. And that has been known to not go well.
In some of the coverage of Blue Orchid today, an actual astronaut, who has spent more than eleven minutes in space (almost eight days in 1992; the first black woman in space), admonished anchors for using the word “mankind” this morning.
This is all so silly on one level.
And yet, existential on another.
I often circle back to a message Paul VI issued at the end of the Second Vatican Council, in no small part because Benedict XVI handed me the same messsge, asking that I share it with all the women of the world. (A lifelong duty? Forgive me if they happen to be my dying words.)
It includes:
At this moment when the human race is under-going so deep a transformation, women impregnated with the spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid mankind in not falling.
And:
Our technology runs the risk of becoming inhuman. Reconcile men with life and above all, we beseech you, watch carefully over the future of our race. Hold back the hand of man who, in a moment of folly, might attempt to destroy human civilization.
And:
Women of the entire universe, whether Christian or non-believing, you to whom life is entrusted at this grave moment in history, it is for you to save the peace of the world.
That’s a wee bit more than making space and murderers hot again.
Katy Perry’s post-flight reflections betrayed a woman wanting more than a new world tour or unmoored meditation (forgive my assumption) can provide. There are real desires that Perry and Lorenz identify. But, ladies, don’t go looking for love in outer space or prison. Something is out there. And it’s eternally better than what some of these days’ headlines show.