With the dildo prank still occurring on courts across the WNBA, The Athletic has jumped into the controversy to blame “misogyny” and to accuse men of “denigrating women.”
This dildo prank has beset the Women’s National Basketball Association as some rowdy fans have taken to throwing a green marital aid onto the court during games.
Two arrests have been made thus far. Kaden Lopez, 18, was arrested on Wednesday in Phoenix for the prank after he was seen throwing a green dildo toward the court during the Phoenix Mercury’s game against the Connecticut Sun.
Kaden insisted he felt compelled to engage in the prank after seeing it on social media.
But the Mercury’s game is only one of many such scenes. Dildos have also been thrown onto the court at a Sky game, a Sparks game, a Dream game, and a New York Liberty game.
The other man arrested for the prank is one Delbert Carver, 23, who was charged with disorderly conduct for his actions during the Atlanta Dream game.
The WNBA is not the first league to face an inundation of sex toys. A similar trend was seen during New England Patriots games back in 2019.
But despite the NFL’s experience with the same prank, a writer for The Athletic is claiming this is a new phenomenon visited only upon the WNBA because men hate women.
For The Athletic, Shannon Ryan disapprovingly writes, “MLB, MLS, and preseason NFL games are ongoing. But this is only happening at WNBA games? … Interesting.”
Ryan notes that the WNBA has had an explosion of popularity and a growing fan base — though she did not correctly note that it started when Caitlin Clark entered the pros — but she went on to decry the negatives of that popularity.
“But these women are still the subject of an occasional punchline. While players are negotiating for higher salaries, they’re still fighting for their reputations to be respected as elite professional athletes. They have now had to be graceful and coolly navigate being unfairly thrust into an obscene moment,” she wrote.
Ryan then went into the history of how men have attempted to keep women out of sports and sports reporting altogether.
“Humiliation, often lewd or sexual, has long been used as an attempt to make women feel uncomfortable in sports or diminish their place in this space,” she said.
For centuries, athletics was a world for men only — a sanctum to prove their masculinity. Into the 20th century, women were widely discouraged from encroaching on this space as medical “experts” decried exercise as detrimental to childbearing and their fragile emotional state. Women, of course, increasingly proved those theories as nonsense, but as they displayed athletic prowess, their femininity and even their sex was questioned, most notably in Olympic and international competitions.
By the mid-1940s, international sports committee leaders required female athletes to have “femininity certificates.” Some were subjected to a “nude parade” in front of a panel of doctors (or asked on their backs to hold their knees to their chests for the doctors to take closer inspection) to prove they were female.
Ryan also recounted the antics of tennis player Bobby Riggs, who in 1973 said, “Women belong in the bedroom and kitchen, in that order.”
She then insisted that the dildo trend is specifically generated by some shadowy conspiracy to “target” the “queer women” of the WNBA.
“In these recent incidents, it’s a stretch to argue targeting the WNBA wasn’t strategic and intentional. Making a sex toy the focal point of games in a league that has perhaps the most openly gay and queer players doesn’t seem like an accident either,” she bloviated.
Ryan concluded with this conspiracy theory: “This is not just a prank or an opportunistic viral moment, but another attempt to demean women in sports.”
That, despite the last guy who did it saying that he did so because he saw viral moments on the Internet.
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