*Dildos. Dildos are being thrown at WNBA games by men – white men – potentially injuring players and the public, as well as being lashed to public infrastructure by ICE. Men behaving badly or stupidly should surprise no one, but this is about as childish – no, infantile – as infantile it gets. Right? We can only hope that the manosphere doesn’t dig any deeper, or stupider. Several arrests have been made but whadda ya wanna bet the perps don’t get anything more than a hand slap? Deep breaths.
From writer Brandy Jensen (an edited version) in Defector.com (full article linked below):
Every misogynist joke poses a question to its female audience: Can you laugh along? Will you be chill or are you going to make a big deal out of this? Are you going to be a bitch about it? Arriving in the form of a dildo, the joke that is also the question becomes a double entendre: Can you take it?”
Writing in The Guardian, Lee Escobedo [yes, male] argues that we must understand these events in the context of “TikTok’s cultural logic” and “the Skibidi Toilet ethos,” even going so far as to claim that “in a memetic landscape poisoned by irony, absurdity is the point. The dildo isn’t symbolic. Its function is noise.”
A dildo—arguably the object which provides the conditions for having a symbolic order at all—is thrust into a scene predicated on the absence of men, and we are meant to buy this isn’t symbolic? Many other objects would have provided absurdity, but it was a dildo for a reason. Whether that reason was wholly comprehended by the person who threw it doesn’t matter. The goal might have been going viral, but the message was still: Stop thinking you can play this game without any dicks involved.
And it’s happening now precisely because players in the WNBA have succeeded in thinking that. The league is getting more attention, more money, and more legitimacy, despite the claims of its many male detractors, who have long insisted that people don’t want to watch female athletes. It’s attracting a wide audience, at a time when members of the federal government are sharing videos about repealing the 19th Amendment. It also, not at all coincidentally, involves a number of high-profile lesbians.