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Like millions of others who\u2019ve spent their lives mostly indifferent to professional sports, in 2024, I found myself an avid-turned-rabid WNBA<\/a> fan. Thanks to star rookies like Caitlin Clark<\/a> and Angel Reese<\/a>, that season saw record-setting viewership and attendance for the league, already outdone in 2025. And according to ESPN<\/a>, this year\u2019s WNBA regular season was the most-watched on its networks in the history of the 29-year-old league, with an average of 1.3 million viewers per game.<\/p>\n I got my first ticket to a WNBA game in May 2024, specifically to see Clark and the Indiana Fever play the New York Liberty at Brooklyn\u2019s Barclays Center. Then something weird happened: I kept buying tickets. I went to multiple games, sometimes alone. <\/p>\n It was Hopeful Girl Fall, when all that lay before us was possibility. Kamala lost but the Liberty didn’t, and I was at that final championship game too. In 2025, friends and I went in on a partial-season-tickets package, and for 2026, we\u2019ve upgraded to a full season with better seats. (The league’s collective bargaining agreement expires on Oct. 31, and in light of growing public division between players and management, a lockout is possible.) <\/p>\n I’ve always enjoyed basketball more than any other sport: Unlike baseball, it moves; unlike football, it’s not somehow simultaneously boring and violent, though hoops can be brutal, especially right now. Practically every team in the league has dealt with multiple serious injuries this season, and there are chippy moments, which I\u2019m slightly ashamed to admit can be fun to watch. (I only just learned the word \u201cchippy\u201d\u2014a \u201cchippy\u201d game is one marked by aggression or fighting.)<\/p>\n My nephew, seeing a suddenly dizzying amount of basketball content on my Instagram said recently, “It is really weird to watch you becoming a huge sports fan.” I tried to explain it\u2014to him and to myself. Being in the arena with other fans was electric. It was a kind of pure joy I hadn\u2019t felt in a long time. <\/p>\n But there was also something exquisite about watching women being so unapologetically cocky. That\u2019s not something we are encouraged to be (just look at the root word), and yet here were women\u2014big, strong, tall, insanely talented women\u2014nailing buckets, then sticking out their tongues and chest-bumping and screaming their feral screams and pointing at Spike Lee as if to say, “That one was for you, bud.” <\/p>\n I felt a flutter when Mercury Phoenix forward Kahleah Copper leaned in so close to softly trash-talk Minnesota Lynx guard Courtney Williams during game three of this year\u2019s semifinals, it was practically erotic. I have watched on repeat the 2025 moment when Clark banked such a deep 3 over the head of Liberty forward Breanna Stewart, the two just grabbed each other and giggled after the swish. I have watched as many times the viral 2024 clip of Nalyssa Smith accidentally knocking over opponent Dijonai Carrington during a play, then instinctively grabbing her around the waist, picking her up off the floor and holding on for just a beat too long. (Carrington and Smith have dated since they were teammates at Baylor.)<\/p>\n Though I’ve explored my bi-curious side a bit, for all intents and purposes, I am a cis, straight woman. And yet, my feelings while watching basketball are undeniably crushlike. And P.S.: The number of times I retyped this graf is a good indication of the inadequacy of labels when it comes to gender and sexuality. Am I more than bi-curious if I\u2019ve actually made out with a woman? Am I less than bisexual because it was only once? Am I effectively straight because I\u2019ve only ever dated men and therefore have all the privilege that comes with straightness even though I consider being attracted to men, especially now, a debilitating sickness? Am I none of the above because I haven\u2019t had sex in years? <\/p>\n WHERE I USE the word \u201ccockiness,\u201d Danielle Heckman, another WNBA fan since 2024, says \u201cswagger.\u201d Swagger is the reason that she\u2014a straight woman\u2014has found herself crushing on players. \u201cThe confidence, the skill\u2014it\u2019s just very attractive.\u201d She describes the vibe at Barclays as \u201cthe most positive place I\u2019ve been in a long time,\u201d which is exactly right.<\/p>\n I ask Heckman a question I\u2019ve asked myself: \u201cDo you, like, wanna\u2026do stuff with the players?,\u2019 by which I mean sex stuff. She takes a second to think about it. \u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cThe crushes feel very high school\u2013like, safe. I was very uncool in high school, so crushes for me were a nonthreatening thing to have. It\u2019s a fantasyland. It\u2019s like having a crush on Brad Pitt.\u201d And, of course, she\u2019s right, in multiple ways: It is like having a crush on Brad Pitt, because these women are elite athletes, and many of them are celebrities. All of them are as out of reach as any pro male baller would be, they just feel closer because, for a lot of us, women inherently do, regardless of our sexual orientation.<\/p>\n Sosenko (right) and a friend at a pre-season Liberty game on May 9, against the Connecticut Sun<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s worth trying to unpack the root of the fantasy will differ from person to person. Some fans may actually be experiencing a sexual awakening. \u201cThe phenomenon of later-in-life lesbians<\/a> is not a new one,\u201d says Jessica Hille, PhD, assistant director of education at the Kinsey Institute and assistant clinical professor at Indiana University. But others may just be finding out what it\u2019s like to be a sports fan. <\/p>\n \u201cThe parallels you can draw between sports and religion are very strong,\u201d Hille says. They both evoke what theorist \u00c9mile Durkheim calls collective effervescence, when \u201cyou all get together and have this shared experience of the holy spirit or the home team [winning] the game. It\u2019s not just the joy that you feel, it\u2019s the essential collective nature of that, and it\u2019s a very powerful emotion. Sports is one of the only ways outside of religion that we\u2019ve captured that socially.\u201d<\/p>\n Another? An event like Taylor Swift\u2019s Eras tour, a parallel Hille makes and that I\u2019ve made too. I said it to my friend Nicole during the WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis in July (because I am now a person who travels to the Midwest to watch sports): I told her that the last time I had felt such a swell of exhilaration and safety was in the summer of 2023, when I saw Swift play Soldier Field in Chicago. Says Hille, \u201cYou\u2019re having this collective experience with other women in a space that is about women performing and succeeding in an arena\u2014literally and metaphorically\u2014that has often been reserved for men, which can also be a new and powerful experience.\u201d<\/p>\n More Women’s Basketball<\/p>\n Los Angeles-based intimacy coach Michaela d\u2019Artois, who is certified by the American Board of Sexology, has a similar take: \u201cWe’re watching these women who are really in their identities, in themselves, and expressing and excelling at this thing that makes them very attractive to us.\u201d Says d\u2019Artois, \u201cIf it feels like attraction, it\u2019s attraction.\u201d But, she adds, it\u2019s important to know that attraction doesn\u2019t necessarily mean sexual attraction\u2014it can be intellectual or physical non-sexual attraction.<\/p>\n This is, I think, the most important revelation: that we are incredibly ill-equipped to process, much less talk about, feelings of intimacy that may not revolve exclusively or at all around sex and romance. Hille points to her research on asexuality<\/a>, aces (asexual folks) and the ace spectrum: the umbrella encompassing multiple asexual identities, like demisexual (feeling sexual attraction for a person only after an emotional bond is made) and greysexual (someone who experiences infrequent and\/or weak sexual attraction). \u201cIn the absence of sex, how do we talk about intimacy? How do we talk about desire? How do we talk about attraction?\u201d Hille posits. <\/p>\n She offers an answer in the ace term \u201csquish,\u201d which is like a crush, except an unromantic one: It\u2019s like, \u201cI want a relationship with you, I want a connection with you, but it\u2019s not about f\u2014ing. It\u2019s not even about romantically dating, I just want us to be besties. Outside of the language in the ace community, on a broad social level, we don\u2019t have good language for that.\u201d Which is really disappointing when you think about how important intimate friendships are to so many of us. \u201cIn the absence of sex, how do we talk about intimacy? How do we talk about desire?”<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no real social rubric for dating friends, for making new friends, in the same way you could go on a date with somebody,\u201d Hille says. Some of us watching the WNBA may have questions about our sexuality. Some of us may just have feelings we don\u2019t know how to name because \u201cthe only language we have for describing any kind of attraction, any kind of admiration\u2026 is borrowed from the way we discuss romance and sex.\u201d<\/p>\n It makes me wonder whether the most important thing, for me at least, isn\u2019t finding answers about my sexuality but acknowledging a deficit of language and an obsessive desire to categorize. Meaning, it\u2019s only helpful for me to figure out why I get butterflies when I see the Liberty\u2019s Natasha Cloud hit a dime pass if I want to. <\/p>\n Side note: In my corner of Brooklyn, Cloud is the most crushed-on player thanks to a combination of insane skill, unequivocal hotness, and an infectiously joyful spirit. She\u2019s been with her teammate Isabelle Harrison, who Cloud describes as \u201ca beautiful straight woman that fell in love with me,\u201d for more than four years.<\/p>\n ANOTHER LAYER to this complex-in-a-great-way proposition is the idea of BUFU, Hille says, or the feeling of \u201cI don\u2019t know if I want to be you or f\u2013k you,\u201d which absolutely rings true for my experience. <\/p>\n When I watch games at home on TV, I often find myself sitting on the edge of my couch, knees wide, as if I might get subbed in at any moment. When I get giddy seeing players touching each other\u2019s butts (they touch each other\u2019s butts so much), I don\u2019t think it\u2019s that I am desperate to get my hands on a butt or have someone else\u2019s hands on mine, it\u2019s that I want to know what it feels like to be part of such a small, sacred sisterhood. I want to know how it feels to be that good at something, to be that driven and confident and singularly focused; to be so overwhelmed by the collective intense desire to get a ball into a net that the only way to express the feeling is to swat each other on the tush in the universal language of, \u201cLET\u2019S F\u2014ING GO.\u201d<\/p>\n The other undeniable component to WNBA crushes for many of us is that, as Heckman says, \u201cmen are getting worse.\u201d Or as d\u2019Artois says, we\u2019re \u201cexperiencing this deep ick toward everything that sort of is the manosphere and masculinity [and] really rebelling against a patriarchal system.\u201d <\/p>\n For me, one of the greatest things about the WNBA is the erasure of anxiety and rage when I step into a world without men for two hours at a clip. Not literally. There are men at the games, obviously. We love those men. Those men are allies. They\u2019re wearing \u201cEveryone Watches Women\u2019s Sports\u201d T-shirts and they\u2019re great. But they\u2019re beside the point. They\u2019re in our space, for once, not the other way around. It\u2019s a bit like the radical Korean feminist movement 4B<\/a>, whose tenets require adherents not to date, marry, have sex with, or procreate with men. I sometimes think of the W as 4B: Sports Edition Lite. <\/p>\n Sosenko (left) and friend at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis for WNBA All-Star Weekend on July 19. “We did not get invited to any of the parties that weekend, which I can only imagine was an oversight,” Sosenko says.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of our society is bound by and dictated by the male gaze,\u201d d\u2019Artois says. \u201dBut I spend a lot of time in queer spaces and female queer spaces, and it’s so safe and beautiful\u2026. There is so much more appreciation of what makes someone uniquely beautiful. There’s so much nurturing and tending to and softness.\u201d She\u2019s right. <\/p>\n We women have our own specific love language, like when we see someone a block away in an outfit we like and feel moved to shout, \u201cGreat dress!\u201d But also? It\u2019s really attractive when the game isn\u2019t so soft, like when the Sun played the Liberty on Aug. 25 and Sun guard Marina Mabrey checked Liberty guard Marine Johannes, who checked her back, only to have the Sun\u2019s Saniya Rivers jump in to scrap on her teammate\u2019s behalf. The fact that Mabrey and Rivers are rumored to be dating added a sexy, almost chivalrous aspect to it.<\/p>\n “I suspect that what the WNBA has unlocked for each of us is highly individual, but the one thing it has unlocked for all of us is joy.” <\/p>\n Which is all to say: Are we gay? Some of us probably are, yeah. Some of us probably aren\u2019t. Some of us are probably more fluid than we realized or let ourselves realize, and that\u2019s all good news. The best news is that we\u2019ve found a space that gives us goosebumps and heart eyes and weak knees. I suspect that what the WNBA has unlocked for each of us is highly individual, but the one thing it has unlocked for all of us is joy, which right now, in the darkest timeline, is especially crucial. I\u2019m not going to question it, I\u2019m just going to be grateful for it.<\/p>\n![\"colorful](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/wh-linebreakers4-68e68e4c95f48.png\" "\\"colorful")
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