This week, the richest man on Earth funded what was marketed as “a historic moment for women”: a crew of female celebrities and influencers launched into space aboard a penis-shaped rocket for eleven glorious minutes. Touted as “women making space,” the stunt was instantly crowned feminist progress by mainstream media — a hollow slogan that means absolutely nothing.

The entire journey cost $28 million — a sum that could radically transform the lives of thousands of women in the United States. For that price, we could provide 140,000 women with free reproductive health care or house over 100 families fleeing domestic violence. We could fund abortion access for 40,000 women in states where their rights have been stripped. But instead, that money went to a spectacle, one where fashion met space tourism to broadcast the illusion of empowerment.

This isn’t just an expensive distraction. It’s a calculated media mirage designed to cover up the ongoing violence funded by the very state that sponsors this so-called feminism. The United States, while celebrating a rocket full of celebrities, is simultaneously funding the extermination of women in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Congo, and Sudan.

As of April 15, 2025, a conservative estimate of more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry — over half of them women and children. In just three weeks from March 18 and April 9 2025, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that 36 out of 224 Israeli airstrikes killed exclusively women and children. This is the same period during which The New York Times and others fawned over space jumpsuits designed by Monse’s Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim — skin-tight and “dangerous,” styled to echo motocross and ski suits, with hair and makeup intact.

What we’re witnessing is not feminism. It is Imperial theater.

While 500 schools and over 400 hospitals have been bombed in Gaza — targeting pregnant women, children, and entire families — we’re meant to cheer for celebrities striking poses against the backdrop of 380,000 children orphaned in Gaza. The erasure of this genocide in favor of “fashion-forward” space flights reveals exactly what this moment is about: power laundering through performative feminism.

Celebrity has often been used to soften the empire, to entertain the colonial project and distract from its crimes. What makes this stunt different is how boldly it tries to rebrand violence as empowerment. So when we see celebrities kiss the Earth upon return, fists in the air, and hashtags about “justice,” but not a word for the murdered women in Gaza, or for pregnant migrants abducted by ICE en route to work, we are forced to ask: Whose justice? Whose feminism? Whose space?

This was not “women making space.” This was women making space for billionaires to continue staging their dominance — on Earth, and beyond.