{"id":824184,"date":"2026-08-24T12:14:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:14:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/824184\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T12:14:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:14:17","slug":"the-men-claiming-to-defend-womens-sports-are-throwing-sex-toys-at-female-athletes-wnba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/824184\/","title":{"rendered":"The men claiming to defend women\u2019s sports are throwing sex toys at female athletes | WNBA"},"content":{"rendered":"

I regret to inform you that yet another dildo has hit a WNBA court. The Chicago Sky v Golden State Valkyries game was sullied by sex toys being chucked on to the playing surface on Friday<\/a>. Aren\u2019t we tired of all this yet? To paraphrase the Sky\u2019s Natasha Cloud<\/a>, it takes a lot of effort to bother with such a juvenile act.<\/p>\n

This is yet another controversy for the WNBA<\/a>, a league that up until a few years ago, most media observers ignored. The WNBA is full of incredibly talented players and has a rich history, but most sports fans treated all but ignored it for the majority of its 30-year existence. But when Caitlin Clark went pro, the league surged. Ratings, attendance, and interest exploded. But not all attention is good attention.<\/p>\n

Clark has been polarizing from the start, owing to the fact that she\u2019s a white superstar in a league that has historically been dominated by Black players. That alone makes her a prime candidate for culture warriors to weigh in<\/a>. But now, the level of debate around the league has somehow become worse. Clark\u2019s teammate, Sophie Cunningham, chose this fraught moment to declare she\u2019s against trans women playing in girls\u2019 and women\u2019s sports<\/a>. Never mind that the league has never had a trans player assigned male at birth and this is all just a hypothetical scenario she\u2019s concerned about. Cunningham is better at getting attention than scoring points<\/a>. Protests outside Fever games<\/a> are often covered on the news more than the games inside the arena, which is hardly the kind of attention the WNBA has been looking for. A league that has long prided itself on its LGBTQ fans and players is now at the center of transphobic controversy. And then, it started raining dildos.<\/p>\n

The Sky-Valkyries game is not the first time sex toys have been thrown on to the court at a WNBA game \u2013 the dismal incidents started last season. It\u2019s not even the only league where this has happened<\/a>. Regardless, the timing is pointed. The WNBA is not just a sports league \u2013 it\u2019s also a furious petri dish for the opinions of people who often don\u2019t even like women\u2019s basketball. A group of crypto traders took responsibility<\/a> for previous incidents and the most recent one in Chicago, declaring their support for Cunningham\u2019s stance against trans women playing in the WNBA (which again, has not happened). You\u2019d think they\u2019d have come up with a new stunt, but apparently, good ideas are in short supply these days (they tried the same stunt last season to promote a meme coin, and there appears to be plenty of self-promotion behind these recent ones too). And if the group \u2013 and many of the anti-trans brigade who have descended on the WNBA \u2013 truly cared about women\u2019s sports, perhaps funding scholarships and teams for young female athletes would be a more constructive way of going about it.<\/p>\n

With outlets like Fox News forced to cover the league and hucksters like ex-NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom coming out to glom onto the controversy<\/a>, the WNBA seems to be drowning in the kind of press no one wants. There\u2019s a long history of athletes speaking up about their political and cultural opinions<\/a>, but this seems especially dire when a women\u2019s basketball player is actively speaking out against a community that has historically supported the sport. The WNBA finds itself in a culture war ignited by one of its own players, and the absurd spectacle of young men throwing sex toys at female athletes in the name of protecting women\u2019s sports is just another front in that conflict. The \u201cstick to sports<\/a>\u201d mantra that was so popular during the first Trump administration has become a punchline every time a dildo gets thrown on a basketball court.<\/p>\n

The sex toy incidents are just the physical manifestation of what Cunningham has done to her league \u2013 a needless plea for attention that serves no one but the person making the fuss. This was not a subject the WNBA was dealing with until she said something. It\u2019s now something the WNBA can\u2019t get away from. If women\u2019s basketball is to maintain its recent growth it needs to continue producing stars like Clark, four-time MVP A\u2019ja Wilson and the ridiculously talented Olivia Miles<\/a>. What it doesn\u2019t need is players who court controversy for their own personal gain. Cunningham was barely on most fans\u2019 radars until she became a meme<\/a>, an honor usually reserved for such cultural luminaries as The Rizzler and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Good for her, I guess. No doubt her post-career podcast will be thrilling. But where does she leave the WNBA? Drowning in the aftermath of childish pranks, it seems.<\/p>\n

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No doubt there will be further moronic stunts this season, especially during the high visibility period of the WNBA playoffs and finals. The league can\u2019t stipulate the terms of players\u2019 speech. It can only ban those young men who disrupt games (and it is only young men who have been apprehended for the stunts so far), although there seems to be an endless supply of them. If the WNBA is going to sustain itself and bring in more genuine fans (as opposed to people solely interested in the league because they want to make a political point), it will need to address all of this in some meaningful way. The bond it has built with many of the LGBTQ fans who have helped sustain and build the league is being torched, with the help of one of its own players. And now outside agitators have joined the party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I regret to inform you that yet another dildo has hit a WNBA court. The Chicago Sky v…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":824185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-824184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/824185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}