At first, WNBA players took the dildo as a joke. The first time a fan threw a green sex toy onto the court, as the Golden State Valkyries played the Atlanta Dream, on July 29, the players were inclined to laugh it off. “Sorry I did NOT mean to throw that so far y’all,” Indiana Fever point guard Sydney Colson wrote on X, where she and Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese made light of the situation.
No one wants to be the prude running for the fainting couch at the sight of a dildo, or the scold telling people to put their sex toys away. But in the days since, several more people have hurled green dildos from the stands at WNBA games. It happened last Friday in Chicago, and on Tuesday at games in New York, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The alleged perpetrator of the Phoenix incident, an 18-year-old man, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, assault, and public display of explicit sexual material after hitting two fans in the back.
Now, players are begging spectators to stop. On X, New York Liberty forward Isabelle Harrison pleaded for arena security to “do better. It’s not funny. never was funny. Throwing ANYTHING on the court is so dangerous.” In her replies are men calling the WNBA boring, calling their fans dykes, laughing at the thought of Reese getting hit in the head, and encouraging more spectators to keep the trend going.
It’s tempting to write all this off as a passing wave of pranks, a microtrend fueled by social media videos and betting opportunities promoted on Polymarket. But dildos landing on the court aren’t just dangerous and distracting to players, who should be able to do their jobs free from fear of being hit in the head by a flying object from two stories up. They’re sexist and homophobic insults that demean the women still fighting to be treated as the equals of their male counterparts. It comes as no surprise that the only two people who’ve been caught for tossing sex toys aren’t a couple of the league’s many lesbian fans celebrating the visibility of their favorite queer players, but men. As another indication that the dildos are being used as a show of sexual dominance over women athletes, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image on Instagram on Thursday depicting his father throwing one at a women’s basketball game from the roof of the white house.
A cryptocurrency group has taken responsibility for the dildos, which they claim were planned to promote a memecoin. The group launched Green Dildo Coin the same day as the first dildo was thrown, purportedly as an awareness-raising protest against the difficulties of being small-time investors in the “toxic” landscape of cryptocurrency. Group members “have been advised to only throw their branded green items if there is a level of personal comfort and the objects can land without hitting someone,” USA Today reported.
In an interview with the paper, a spokesperson for the crypto group said they were not affiliated with the two men who were arrested. He also brushed off accusations that the pranks were disrespectful. “Creating disruption at games is like, it happens in every single sport, right?” he said. Other observers have similarly tried to minimize the degrading and potentially unsafe nature of the prank, pointing out that Buffalo Bills fans have thrown dildos on the football field when their team has played the New England Patriots.
Far be it from me to defend a Buffalo Bills fan, but football players wear helmets and padding on a field 12 times larger than a basketball court, making a flying dildo much less dangerous. And it’s foolish to pretend that the context is identical. Throwing a piece of penis-shaped, penetration-ready silicone at a woman in her workplace sends a much different message than tossing one at a man.
Women in the public eye, especially ones who excel in fields historically populated by men, are routinely sexualized by audiences in demeaning and threatening ways as a bid to diminish their power. And right now, the WNBA is at the height of its power. Over the past two years, the league has seen a surge of new viewers on television and spectators in seats. Even as a few misogynist critics repeat the same insults that have been lobbed at the WNBA since its inception, players and teams are bringing in more fans than ever before. Investors, sports media outlets, and tastemakers of all sorts are taking notice.
This dildo trend isn’t happening in a vacuum. During the past two seasons, as viewership has risen, players and league administrators have noted an uptick in verbal and online abuse toward the players, including racist, sexist, and homophobic smears. “Every game, just—it’s, like, hatred out there toward other players,” said Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier on a recent podcast episode. The league is “trending in a really bad spot with that.”
Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas said the worst of the abuse comes from a subset of fans of the Indiana Fever, home of star point guard Caitlin Clark, whose sensational streak of college wins last year has been credited with bringing a horde of new fans to the WNBA. “Basketball is headed in a great direction, but we don’t want fans that are going to degrade us and call us racial things,” Thomas said.
In a statement last year, the league recognized that as its viewership spikes, its fan culture may be changing in disturbing ways: “While we welcome a growing fan base, the WNBA will not tolerate racist, derogatory, or threatening comments made about players, teams and anyone affiliated with the league.”
The audience culture at professional women’s sports games has historically been family-friendly, respectful, and heavily dominated by women and queer people. The plus side to having a smaller audience is that the members self-select: Back when the WNBA wasn’t considered must-see basketball for every major sports fan, people too immature and senseless to realize why throwing a sex toy at a woman is sexual harassment—or who’d want to throw one for that very reason—stayed home.
Now that that’s no longer the case, the WNBA needs to get tough on spectators behaving badly. Otherwise, they’ll risk losing the ones they started with, who won’t want to come to games just to sit in the stands with a crowd of boorish jerks. More importantly, the players will lose faith that the league they’ve worked to build up is prepared to provide them a safe and dignified working environment. They’re already agitating for better pay in a contentious collective bargaining negotiation. They shouldn’t have to waste their energy worrying about errant dildos, too.
