Emily Ratajkowski Slams All-Female Blue Origin Space Flight: 'Privilege Is Not an Accomplishment'
Emily Ratajkowski has joined the conversation surrounding Blue Origin's all-female space flight and feels it's 'not an accomplishment.'
The model-actress took to her TikTok on Monday to share her thoughts, shortly after Katy Perry, Gayle King and Jeff Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez were among six women who flew to the edge of space on the Amazon founder's Blue Origin spaceflight.
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'That space mission this morning, that's end-time shit. Like, this is beyond parody,' she began. 'Saying that you care about Mother Earth, and it's about Mother Earth, and going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that's single-handedly destroying the planet? Look at the state of the world, and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space, and for what? For what, what was the marketing there? And then to try to make it like … I'm disgusted. Literally, I'm disgusted.'
Ratajkowski isn't the first to criticize the latest space expedition, as Olivia Munn questioned the purpose of the mission earlier this month. 'I know this is probably not the cool thing to say, but there are so many other things that are so important in the world right now,' she said in part. 'What are you guys going to do up in space?'
On Tuesday, the We Are Your Friends actress returned to TikTok to expand on her thoughts about the Blue Origin flight, which also carried film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and research scientist Amanda Nguyen on its 11th manned mission.
'I think that this space mission is confusing to people because seeing women and people of color in spaces like science and politics that have not previously included them feels and looks like, really looks like — optically looks like — progress,' Ratajkowski said in her latest video. 'But the truth is, is that having a man who has gained his power and become a part of the one percent purely through exploitation and greed deciding to take his fiancée and a few other famous women to space for space tourism is not progress.'
She continued, 'It just speaks to the fact that we are absolutely living in an oligarchy, where there is a very small group of people who are interested in going to space for the sake of getting a new lease on life while the rest of the population — most people on Planet Earth — are worried about paying rent, or, you know, having dinner for their kids.'
Ratajkowski also echoed what she claimed another creator said, ''Privilege is not an accomplishment,'' adding, 'Exploitation is certainly not an accomplishment, and being able to take the privilege that you have gained from exploitation and greed of the planet, of resources, of human beings, and then doing something like going to space for 11 minutes, is certainly not an accomplishment.'
'That's why this all is giving Hunger Games, right?' she concluded. 'Because I think we're in a place in the world where we need to be able to discern what real progress looks like, and what happened yesterday was nothing like that.'
Sánchez and King responded to backlash during a post-trip press conference on Monday, with the CBS Morning co-anchor saying, 'I feel anybody that's criticizing doesn't really understand what's happening here. We've all heard it. We were even all talking about that.' King also urged critics to do a 'deep dive' into what the flight represents for some people.
'I would love to have [critics] come to Blue Origin and see the thousands of employees that don't just work here, but they put their heart and soul into this vehicle,' Sánchez added. 'They love their work and they love the mission and it's a big deal for them.'
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