Katy Perry's music has always been strictly fine to me. I've never much cared for her as a person, mostly because celebrities are generally too unrelatable for me to bother investing too much energy into (there are exceptions, of course, but this isn't one of them). But I really don't like her self-proclaimed persona as a so-called supporter of women. She's mostly a supporter of herself.
To celebrate women, womanhood, femininity, choose whatever term works best for you, you have to actively lift up other women. And for the love of god, I don't mean literally. A brief, blink-and-you-missed it ride into zero-gravity with other women on board does not count.
According to The Daily Mail, Perry regrets "making a public spectacle" of the whole event. Holding up that daisy, dropping to the ground, going on and on about love as if she were an actual astronaut returning from a months-long mission in actual space -- at least she's having some second thoughts about all that.
But the biggest criticism of this whole thing has been her emphasis on this all-women crew spending a few minutes "in space." She so desperately wants to be seen as a woman supporting women. "Woman's World" isn't going to get her there, especially considering who she worked with on that project. Show me where Katy Perry has actually made an effort to support her fellow ladies.
It allegedly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars even to have a ticket for this kind of flight, not counting how much it costs for the whole thing to operate. People aren't mad because Katy Perry brought a daisy into space. They're mad because doing everything but using your exponential resources to help women -- financially, emotionally, physically -- is an ick like no other.
Sure, regret your speech. Regret the flower. But maybe think for a few seconds about how, instead of using a monumental platform to promote an upcoming tour or give a shoutout to your daughter, you could have, just maybe, called an important issue to the world's attention. Instead of women's actual issues being at the forefront of your space trip, it was, as it always is, solely about you.