At least six sex toys have been thrown onto WNBA courts in the last two weeks — while players were actively engaged in the game, while the ball was on the floor. What began seemingly as an odd one-time prank has since been revealed as a broader scheme designed by cryptocurrency meme coin creators, a string of words that ideally never would have even existed in the first place, let alone become the impetus behind what's starting to feel like a grimy, degrading experience.
A spokesperson for the group told USA Today they were seeking opportunities to disrupt games, hence the lime green dildos that have been fired at will into the stands and onto courts in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York. There doesn't seem to be any real reason why; at most, it reeks of a harebrained scheme cooked up by a group of people who see women as little more than characters in a story they want to tell, a group of people who didn't see any reason to hesitate to render a group of the best women's basketball players in the world helpless and forced to comply with something they just thought might be funny.
The WNBA is a league of women: more specifically, there are, and always have been, a lot of Black women and a lot of queer women on the court. Basketball is different from a sport like soccer, where players often seem like little more than small dots on the pitch; hoopers are right in your face. Their identities, their bodies, their energy is all right there, demanding something of you, inspiring feelings of awe, of support, and, perhaps, even of fear.
What do we do when we are afraid? Some of us cower, but others project, try to cover it up, try to distract from a problem we feel ill-equipped to handle. And sure, it's easy to laugh off a few sex toys, but it's also... not really that funny in the first place.
The idea that the WNBA is experiencing unprecedented growth right now is indisputable; there have never been more fans in the stands, more people watching from home, more interest and engagement. But with that will come the need to more appropriately protect players, first, and their coaches, the team's staff, and people who are at a game to have a good time and see their favorite players play the game that they love.
"If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend."Charlotte Bronte, Shirley
The world does not always respond kindly when women make great gains, especially when those gains seem to come too quickly, or take some by surprise (usually the only people who are surprised are the people who weren't paying attention in the first place). It's all too easy for a subset of people to respond to something they don't understand by ridiculing it, and that kind of response is, frankly, dumb as hell.
"It's ridiculous. It's dumb. It's stupid," said coach Lynne Roberts earlier this week after a sex toy landed on the floor at the Crypto.com Arena. And she's right: it is truly, actually stupid. But it's also a little more than that.
One of the earliest lessons so many girls learn, and that desperately needs to be dismantled and thrown away, is that when a boy likes you, he'll pick on you, he'll bother you, he'll make fun of you. A second is often that when a boy feels threatened by you, he might go out of his way to make sure you know he can get in the way of your success any time he wants to. And while the gender identity of everyone involved is unclear at present, the misogyny is so thick you can almost taste it.
"[This is] The sexualization of women, this is the latest version of that," said Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve Thursday. "And it's not funny. It should not be the butt of jokes on any radio shows, or in print, or in any comments. The sexualization of women is what's used to hold women down. And this is no different."
The women of the WNBA aren't characters in some crypto bro's bizarre attention-kink fantasy play; they're professional women at work, they're mothers, they're partners and wives. They are grown. They deserve to be respected in the environment in which they operate, to be safe, and to be able to do their jobs without someone — who has apparently nothing better to do with their time, and who could think of literally nothing more creative than degradation of an entire league of women in pursuit of a laugh, of clicks, of whatever demented ploy is at the heart of this — sexualizing a single part of it.