It’s been 10 days since the first sex toy hit a WNBA court during the Atlanta Dream’s game against the Golden State Valkyries on July 29. Since then, sex toys were thrown during at least six more games, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn and Phoenix.
At first, the memes flew fast and furious. The WNBA’s largely LGBTQ+ fanbase was quick to claim the prank as being by and for their community, and emblematic of just how queer the culture of the league is. Some players even joined in on the jokes, with Sydney Colson, an Indiana Fever point guard, tweeting, “Sorry I did NOT mean to throw that so far y’all,” and Kierstan Bell, a guard for the Las Vegas Aces, adding, “Damn how my sh– get there.”
But as the objects kept coming, it got less and less funny.
More players spoke out in anger and frustration, explaining the stunts were a distraction from the game and a danger to the athletes on the court.
“Everyone that’s out here making wild jokes, laughing on networks and socials, and making cruel comments is weird and whack,” Seattle Storm guard Brittney Sykes tweeted.
“ARENA SECURITY?! Hello??! Please do better,” New York Liberty player Isabelle Harrison said on X. “Throwing ANYTHING on the court is so dangerous.”
As someone who writes about the intersection of sports and LGBTQ+ culture, I’ve been watching the story unfold but hesitated to write anything about it because there was a nagging question I couldn’t shake, one that would determine exactly how I felt about this story: Who was throwing the sex toys?
To be clear, I don’t think it was a funny prank regardless of who was doing the throwing, as it both sexualizes and endangers athletes while they are at work. But the dynamic of power is wildly different between queer women fans of the WNBA throwing sex toys onto the court, and men throwing sexual objects at a women’s sporting event.
This past week, that question was answered when two arrests were made and a cryptocurrency group came forward to accept responsibility for the stunts. Delbert Carver, 23, of Marietta, Ga., was arrested Aug. 1 for allegedly throwing a green sex toy onto the court during the Dream’s home game against the Phoenix Mercury.
Carver also confessed to throwing the sex toy at the July 29 game against the Valkyries, as well, though the cryptocurrency group denies that Carver is affiliated with them and claims he didn’t throw the first toy. An 18-year-old man, Kaden Lopez, was arrested at PHX Arena in Phoenix during the Mercury-Connecticut Sun game for throwing a green sex toy into the stands.
“It was more or less like an opportunistic approach to, you know, what is already trending,” an anonymous member of the group told ESPN to describe their reason for targeting the WNBA. “Where is there already controversy and how do we intercept some of that attention?” He also told ESPN that they “wanted to really make memes funny again.”
But there is nothing funny about a group of men exploiting a women’s sports league for their cryptocurrency scheme.
In fact, people are already financially benefitting from the stunt, with Crypto-based prediction markets allowing users to make bets on whether there will be a sex toy-based disruption at games. By using the sex toy to make their point, the stunt becomes more than just an annoyance or a danger during play — it becomes a sexualized threat to the women on the court, an allusion to violence that can keep them in their place.
A man throwing a sex toy shaped like a male anatomy at a women’s sporting event is perpetuating rape culture, plain and simple.
“This has been going on for centuries, the sexualization of women,” Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve told the media earlier this week. “This is the latest version of that. And it’s not funny.”
“We didn’t do this because … we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” a representative for the crypto group told USA Today. “Creating disruption at games is like, it happens in every single sport, right? We’ve seen it in the NFL, we’ve seen it in hockey, you know … fans doing random things to more or less create attention.”
Unfortunately for him, just because the group’s intention may not have been to sexually harass WNBA players, the impact remains the same. By exploiting women’s space in a sexually charged way and non-consensually throwing an object that could also easily have hurt a player, these men are asserting power and dominance in a space that actively de-centers them.
Not only that, they chose an item that is associated with women, lesbians and lesbian sex, adding a homophobic wrinkle to it, as well as threats of corrective rape. And now, as security tightens at arenas across the league, they have potentially endangered gay and trans fans, who may be packing under their clothing for gender affirming reasons and could now be subjected to more intrusive searches at the doors.
So while the sex toys that Buffalo Bills fans threw during games against the New England Patriots are also inappropriate, the systemic power dynamics are not the same in the NFL as they are in the WNBA. The incidents are not comparable, and a group of men thinking they can hitch themselves to a women’s league that is finally seeing the growth it has worked nearly three decades to earn shows that they only see women’s sports as something to exploit for their own gain and haven’t given any thought to how that space is different from a men’s sporting event.
“It’s not lost on me how all these occurrences start popping up after WNBA players took center stage and America’s attention when demanding to be paid what they’re owed,” WNBA reporter Christan Braswell tweeted.
And he’s right. The players of the WNBA are entering the fight of their lives after opting out of their collective bargaining agreement. There are threats of a work stoppage as the deadline to reach an agreement with the league is fast approaching, and the two sides don’t seem close to being aligned.
For a group of men to then try to leverage the success of women athletes who are historically underpaid as a way of lining their own pockets is nothing short of grotesque.
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