Space Tourism

Hating on the Women of the Cock Rocket Grand Tour

There’s a huge misogyny problem with how people are going after the women on Bezos’ cock rocket grand tour.

To be clear, I think space tourism is obscene.

I think the people who make that trip are as blind to the optics as were the 17th and 18th century aristocrats taking the Grand Tour. From around 1750 to 1860, tenants who’d subsisted on those aristocrats’ land for generations were removed — often with brute force — from land by the Highland Clearances.

By the late 1700s, most people could no longer make a living in the country. Tenant farmers were pushed off the land and into the sweat shops of the Industrial Revolution. While these “peasants” were left with little recourse, the aristocrats profited off their displacement. And, those same aristocrats continued their luxury Grand Tours, deemed a necessity for a well-rounded member of Society.

Space tourism is a starkly similar kind of social and economic disparity as those old European aristocrats’ Grand Tours. Indeed, the economic disparities today are statistically comparable to those between the French aristocrats and the peasants before the French Revolution. Even as the revolution was looming, Britain and Europe’s elite aristocracy continued their requisite luxury Grand Tours.