When Lily Allen told her Miss Me? podcast audience on 28 April 2025 that she wanted to apologise for “being mean about Katy Perry last week”, the admission landed with an unusual clarity. Here was a public figure, in real time, disassembling her own instincts on microphone. “There was actually no need for me to bring her name into it, and it was my own internalised misogyny,” Allen told co-host Miquita Oliver, as reported by the BBC. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it was just completely unnecessary to pile on with her.”
It was not the apology itself that mattered most, though it was refreshingly specific. It was the diagnosis Allen offered: that her impulse to single out Perry from the six women aboard Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission on 14 April was driven less by principled critique and more by an unconscious habit of targeting visible, divisive women. “She was possibly the most famous, and the one that divides people the most, and so there was something in me that decided to choose her as the person that should [be singled out],” Allen continued. The remark cut to the heart of a cultural moment that has exposed the fault lines within feminist discourse, celebrity accountability, and the politics of public shaming.
The Flight That Launched a Thousand Hot Takes
The facts of the NS-31 mission are straightforward enough. On 14 April 2025, six women launched from Blue Origin’s facility in West Texas aboard the New Shepard rocket. The crew comprised pop star Katy Perry, CBS anchor Gayle King, journalist and Jeff Bezos’s then-fiancée Lauren Sánchez, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyễn, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. The flight lasted approximately 11 minutes, reaching an apogee of 107 kilometres – just beyond the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space – before returning to Earth. It was the first all-female crewed spaceflight since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo orbital mission in 1963, according to Blue Origin’s official mission page.
What followed the flight was not celebration but contention. Perry, who held up a butterfly-shaped card printed with her Lifetimes Tour setlist during weightlessness and sang Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, became the lightning rod. Fast-food chain Wendy’s posted on social media: “Can we send her back.” Olivia Munn, appearing on NBC’s Today with Jenna & Friends before the launch, called the mission “gluttonous” and questioned its point: “What are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?” Emily Ratajkowski went further on TikTok, calling the mission “end-time sh*t” and “beyond parody”, adding: “Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space. For what?”
Allen’s Original Comments: A Textbook Pile-On
Allen’s initial remarks, delivered on the 17 April episode of Miss Me?, were blunt. “Do we want to talk about Katy Perry and her mates all going up to space for 12 minutes?” she asked Oliver. “I mean, what the f – ing hell is all that about? In all seriousness, what? Why? For why?” She continued: “It’s so out of touch. We’re on the brink of recession. People are really f – ing struggling to make ends meet and get food on their table.” Allen’s critique had merit – the flight’s framing as feminist empowerment while serving as a promotional vehicle for Blue Origin’s commercial space tourism ambitions was genuinely worth interrogating. But her framing zeroed in on Perry alone, the easy target, the most polarising figure in the crew.
As Allen later acknowledged, the other passengers included a rocket scientist, a civil rights activist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and a journalist with decades of broadcast credibility. Perry, for all her pop-culture ubiquity, was simply the most recognisable name. Allen’s co-host Oliver underscored the asymmetry by noting that only the rocket scientist, Aisha Bowe, and the activist, Amanda Nguyễn, merited genuine congratulations. The criticism, in other words, was never really about the mission’s substance. It was about the ritual of taking down a celebrity whose public persona invites scorn.
The Anatomy of Internalised Misogyny
Allen’s willingness to name her own bias invited scrutiny of a concept that has become both increasingly visible and increasingly contested in public discourse. Internalised misogyny – defined by researchers as the unconscious absorption of patriarchal attitudes that leads women to police, undermine, or target other women – has long been identified as a barrier to gender solidarity. What made Allen’s invocation distinctive was its precision. She did not offer a vague mea culpa. She identified the mechanism: that Perry’s status as a polarising figure made her a satisfying target, and that this satisfaction was itself gendered.
The pattern is well documented. A 2022 study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly found that female public figures receive disproportionate ad hominem attacks when addressing topics considered “serious” – politics, economics, social justice – compared with their male counterparts. Male critics of space tourism, such as those who routinely mock Elon Musk’s Mars colonisation rhetoric, are rarely accused of jealousy or pettiness. Women who critique other women, however, risk being framed as engaging in petty infighting rather than substantive analysis. Gayle King herself pointed to this double standard in a CBS Mornings interview: “You never see a man, a male astronaut, who’s going up in space and they say, ‘Oh, he took a ride.’ It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that’s a little disrespectful.”
Allen’s apology, then, was not merely personal. It named a systemic habit: the tendency for public criticism of women to default to individualised blame rather than structural analysis. By choosing Perry – the most famous and most divisive member of the crew – Allen had unconsciously replicated the very dynamic she claimed to oppose.
The Feminist Paradox of the NS-31 Mission
The broader debate around the Blue Origin flight exposed a genuine intellectual tension within contemporary feminism. Lauren Sánchez, who organised the crew, positioned the mission as a milestone for women in a field where they remain vastly underrepresented. “Go ask anyone who works here how they feel about this mission. I think you’ll get choked up,” she told reporters. Gayle King echoed the sentiment, insisting the criticism was rooted in “haters” who sought to “steal my joy.”
Critics countered that visibility is not power. As Forbes columnist Gemma Allen observed, the mission was not accompanied by announcements of new pipeline programmes, research grants, or initiatives to address gender disparities in aerospace leadership. “Just six passengers, and a press strategy built for orbit,” she wrote. The New Feminist’s Sameena Khan argued that the environmental cost alone undermined any feminist claim: “A single space tourism flight produces more carbon emissions than most people in developing nations generate in their lifetimes. It is hard to call any of this empowerment when it is clearly climate violence.”
The philosopher Nancy Fraser’s framework – articulated in her 2009 work Fortunes of Feminism – is useful here. Fraser argued that progressive movements must address both redistribution (who benefits materially) and recognition (who gains symbolic status). The NS-31 mission offered recognition in abundance: the first all-female crew in over six decades, a moment of symbolic visibility. But redistribution – the material conditions of women in STEM, the economic precarity of women globally – was conspicuously absent from the mission’s messaging. Perry’s on-camera promotion of her tour setlist, while commercially shrewd, crystallised the contradiction: feminism as branding, empowerment as spectacle.
What Allen’s Apology Actually Achieved
Effective public accountability, according to communication scholars who study celebrity apologies, rests on three pillars: specificity, humility, and actionable commitment. Allen demonstrated the first two. She named her misstep precisely, expressed genuine regret, and avoided the equivocation that typically renders celebrity apologies performative. “I would have been hurt if it had been me and someone in my industry used me and my name,” she said, as reported by Rolling Stone. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Katy Perry. I know you don’t listen to the show, but yeah, sorry.”
The third pillar – actionable commitment – was largely absent. Allen did not outline concrete steps toward amplifying marginalised voices in future discussions or pledge to redirect her platform’s influence toward the substantive critiques she initially gestured at. This gap is not unique to Allen; it reflects a wider challenge in digital-age ethics: the distance between contrition and structural change. Perry, for her part, has maintained silence on the apology, choosing not to respond publicly.
The Double Standard That Endures
What made Allen’s apology resonant was its implicit acknowledgment of a persistent asymmetry. When men in public life criticise one another, the act is interpreted as commentary. When women do the same, it risks being decoded as jealousy, pettiness, or – in Allen’s framing – internalised misogyny. The distinction matters because it shapes what kinds of criticism women can safely offer. Structural critique of Blue Origin’s commercial model, of Jeff Bezos’s use of feminist imagery to sell space tourism, of the environmental costs of suborbital flights – these are valid, necessary arguments. But they require an interlocutor, a specific target, and the culture’s default is to make that target a woman.
Allen’s journey from outrage to introspection is instructive not because it resolved these tensions but because it made them visible. In an era where every podcast episode is archived and every apology is parsed, the space for genuine self-correction is narrowing. Allen used hers well, imperfectly but honestly. Whether that honesty changes anything beyond the next news cycle remains, as ever, an open question.
