Let’s talk about what happened at the Fever vs. Sparks game on August 5.
In the second quarter of the WNBA game, per CNN, a spectator threw a green sex toy onto the court, appearing to hit player Sophie Cunningham in the leg. And this was the third such incident in the past week. As a matter of fact, Cunningham herself had tweeted about the misogynistic new trend just days before she became its latest target.
“Stop throwing dildos on the court… you’re going to hurt one of us,” she wrote on August 1. After the August 5 incident, she quote-tweeted herself, writing wryly, “this did NOT age well.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
At least one of the people who threw a sex toy onto the court at a WNBA game has been arrested and charged, according to CNN, but the person who disrupted the Fever vs. Sparks game does not appear to have been identified yet.
After the game, Los Angeles Sparks coach Lynne Roberts emphasized safety concerns when speaking to reporters, per CNN. “I think it’s ridiculous, it’s dumb, it’s stupid,” she said. “It’s also dangerous and players’ safety is No. 1. Respecting the game. All those things. I think it’s really stupid.” Neither Roberts nor Cunningham mentioned the other obvious fact staring us all in the face. Nobody is throwing dildos on the court at men’s basketball games.
The popularity of women’s basketball has skyrocketed recently. In 2025, WNBA viewership on ABC is up 20 percent from last year’s season average, per ESPN. In 2024, the NCAA women’s basketball championship game drew a bigger audience than the men’s for the first time in history. Cunningham, Angel Reese, and Caitlin Clark, as three of the WNBA’s biggest current stars, have become world famous. All of this is an unqualified good for society, and hopefully a harbinger of more respect (and money) being afforded to female athletes in the future.
What sucks is that we also live in a patriarchal society in a time of feminist backlash. Our country’s Republican leaders have openly espoused retrograde attitudes towards women, while male podcasters such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan control the ears of millions of young men. So it’s pretty unsurprising that women gaining power in professional basketball—an area that has typically been dominated by men—would be greeted by this kind of misogynistic stunt. The message behind a sex toy in particular is pretty unambiguous. The intent is to sexualize and demean the women players because they are women. And that is nothing new at all.
If I had a nickel for every time a sex toy was thrown on the court at a WNBA game, I would have just three nickels. But if I had a nickel for every time a powerful female athlete was subjected to some kind of misogynistic backlash, I’d have enough money to fund my own women’s basketball league. Take, for instance, another women’s sports team that had the gall to outperform their male counterparts, the U.S. Women’s National Team.
In 2019, the team, led by Megan Rapinoe, won their fourth World Cup. But as Rapinoe’s star continued to rise, so did the sexist attacks. When they lost the World Cup in 2023, trolls on the internet and on TV celebrated the loss. That same year, Rapinoe called out the “deep level of misogyny and sexism” in the Spanish football federation after its president, Luis Rubiales, kissed player Jenni Hermoso on the lips. Tennis GOAT and fellow world class athlete, Serena Williams, has also called out sexism in her sport. Notably, in 2018, she called out an umpire for sexist treatment of her, per ESPN. And that is to say nothing of other kinds of misogynistic threats female athletes face. In February, tennis player Emma Raducanu spotted a man who’d been stalking her in the stands in the middle of a match.
I don’t blame Sophie Cunningham or Roberts for declining to mention the sexism in the room. There’s a reasonable fear, especially considering what happened the last time Cunningham mentioned the trend, that this would only attract additional misogynistic attacks. Because that is still the world we live in.
The post Throwing Dildos at WNBA Games Has Become a Trend. We Need to Talk About It appeared first on Glamour.
