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We are now several days into the “Katy Perry and friends went to space!” news cycle, and things are getting weird. How weird, you ask? Well, rather than let the story fade away, a proxy for Perry is now demanding an apology from a fast-food chain.
People magazine broke this rather extraordinary news on Thursday afternoon with a story headlined “Katy Perry Deserves an Apology from Wendy’s for ‘Blatantly Inappropriate’ Blue Origin Comments: Exclusive Source.” As what is truly a remarkable article recounts, Perry and her fellow astronauts have received a groundswell of criticism in recent days, which included some posts on the official X account for Wendy’s, the burger chain that, for better or worse, long ago pioneered the strategy of brands promoting themselves via irreverent tweets.
Can we send her back
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) April 15, 2025
“Can we send her back,” the account wrote Monday evening, as in back to space after Perry’s voyage had ended. How this does anything to sell burgers is beyond me, but it’s pretty standard internet humor, down to the wannabe casual lack of question mark. That’s not how “a source close to the situation” saw it, though, and they were so mad that they decided to call People about it. “Wendy’s didn’t make a joke—they made a choice,” the source told the magazine. “Their recent posts on X aimed at Katy Perry were not only disrespectful, but blatantly inappropriate.” They went on, and only got more self-serious: “This wasn’t harmless banter, this was a billion-dollar brand using its platform to publicly demean a woman.”
Uh, demean a woman? Let’s take it down a notch, anonymous Perry vigilante. Who could the masked crusader be? The weaponized victimhood in these quotes definitely caught my attention, and honestly, reminded me of some of Taylor Swift’s more bone-headed moments. As delicious as that would be—remember, Swift and Perry squashed their beef years ago—I’m not deluded enough to think Swift would go out on a limb for Perry here. All signs point to the source being someone from Perry’s camp, whether it be a manager or a publicist or some other member of her inner circle. The only thing is, these quotes are so over the top that I’m actually suspicious. I mean: “Telling a woman that she should be ‘sent back’ is shameful bullying and reflects a troubling willingness to tear down in today’s society … What’s worse is that the face of Wendy’s is a woman, which makes this decision not just hypocritical, but painfully ironic.” Has it really come to calling out a cartoon logo for not being a girl’s girl? I’m surprised the anonymous source’s next point wasn’t something about how Perry has always been such an ally to the burger community.
One of the most likeable facets of Perry, something that’s persisted even as her career has stumbled, has been how fundamentally silly she is. Whoever is spewing all this outrage on her behalf to People and the like isn’t doing her any favors, because it undercuts one of the only things people have continued to appreciate about her, which is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Never mind ill-considered, it’s also downright absurd for the Perry-defender to attempt to position the star as the victim of some kind of bullying campaign, which I felt lingering in the use of the phrase “targeted hostility” to Page Six. Perry getting made fun of for something she absolutely deserves to get made fun of for is hardly targeted hostility. Honestly, I find it refreshing that the internet seemed to find the exact right level of negativity to apply to Perry for this debacle, which was not calling for her death or cancelation but making the pretty mild joke that if she likes space so much she can stay there, har har.
There’s some part of me that hopes this whole statement was a joke, that one of our most ridiculous pop stars is simply giving us all something to laugh about. But Perry has never struck me as capable of that level of self-awareness, so I can only conclude that it’s real. Or maybe this is all part of a larger stunt that will be resolved with Perry’s second Blue Origin flight, wherein this time she makes history by becoming the first pop star to eat chicken nuggets in space. It’s got Super Bowl commercial written all over it.
