Get The Gavel
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According to arrest documents, Lopez told police that “it was just a stupid prank that was trending on social media.” Lopez reportedly called it “a joke.” But no one in the WNBA seems to be laughing.
“It’s super disrespectful,” Elizabeth Williams of the Chicago Sky told reporters last week. “I don’t really get the point of it. It’s really immature. Whoever is doing it needs to grow up.”
The point, of course, is to demean women. Cheryl Reeve, head coach of the Minnesota Lynx, called it “the latest version” of what’s “been going on for centuries.”
“The sexualization of women is what’s used to hold women down. And this is no different. This is just its latest form, and we should write about it in that way,” she told reporters last week. “And these people that are doing this should be held accountable, and we’re not the butt of the joke. They’re the problem. And we need to take action.”
Calling it out for exactly what it is — misogyny — is the most immediate way to take action. Writing it off as a dumb joke or a pathetic attempt at TikTok fame gives the perpetrators undeserved cover.
In an exclusive interview last week with USA Today, a group of crypto bros claimed they started the stupid idea for publicity for their meme coin but disavowed any connection to the two men arrested.
“We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous,” the group’s spokesman said.
But the group’s so-called “prank” specifically targeted women’s basketball with items shaped like a male sex organ. If that’s not a dislike of women’s sports, it certainly seems a clear sign of the group’s disrespect for them.
It’s probably not a coincidence that these sex-toy shenanigans are happening as the WNBA’s prominence (but not player salaries) is surging due to the popularity of players like the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark, Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx, and A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces.
This clearly bothers some men, while others view it as barely worth noting. In a segment on “CNN This Morning” last week, Aaron Blake, a CNN senior political reporter, lamented the sorry state of baseball’s Minnesota Twins and said that the state hasn’t “won a major championship since 1991,” when the Twins won the World Series.
After a beat, Blake added, “I should say, if you don’t count the Minnesota Lynx. That’s a key caveat here.” But why would anyone not count the Lynx, who won WNBA championships in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017?
Oh, right. They’re women.
Under the phony guise of protecting women’s sports, President Trump has incessantly lambasted trans girls’ and women’s participation on female sports teams. Even his often incoherent press conference on Monday veered from fake justifications for turning Washington, D.C., into a federal police state to ranting about “men playing in women’s sports.”
What Trump hasn’t mentioned is the real issue of women athletes having sex toys hurled at them or what should happen to those accused of doing it. But one of his sons, Donald Jr., posted a meme of his father, who was walking around the roof of the White House last week, throwing a green sex toy at a group of women players on a basketball court.
When the president’s son mocks women athletes and tries to squeeze an ugly laugh out of his father’s unvarnished disdain for women, that emboldens the next idiot to do something dumb and potentially dangerous at a WNBA game.
Fans throwing things onto fields of play aren’t new. But this isn’t about a frenzied moment of competition. What’s happening at WNBA games is sexual harassment and a manifestation of the hostile masculinity that exists to keep women in their place whenever they prove that their place is everywhere.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.