There isn’t a galaxy far, far enough away where women can escape sexist online trolls.
Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman to go into space when she joined a group of six space tourists in a launch led by Blue Originthe aerospace company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
“We got to weightlessness, I immediately turned upside down and looked at the planet and then there was so much blackness. There was so much space,” Calandrelli said in a video posted on social media showing her reacting in awe to seeing Earth from space.
She added: “I didn’t expect to see so much space, and I kept saying it was our planet! This is our planet! It was the same feeling I got when my kids were born, and I was like, ‘That’s my baby!'”
But it wasn’t long before the comments below the video were flooded with hateful, objectifying comments.
The astronaut and MIT engineer said some have sexualized her reaction to viewing the planet from space. The incident led to Blue Origin taking down the original video from its social media accounts.
Calandrelli, who also hosts a television show on Netflix called Emily’s Wonder Lab, where she is known as “Space Gal,” said the reactions made her sad and angry, but she redoubled her joy. In a Instagram postshe wrote that she refuses “to give much time to the little men on the Internet.
“I feel experiences in my soul. It’s a quality I got from my father,” she said. “We feel every emotion deeply and what a beautiful way to experience life. This joy is tattooed on my heart.”
“I will not apologize or feel strange about my reaction. It’s all mine and I love it.”
Calandrelli said in a maintenance with CNN saying that the beauty of sending more women into space is that they “can describe it in a way that moms can understand, that women can understand”.
Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.
