Green dildo trend affirms WNBA as America’s first virtual reality sports league

Even law enforcement hasn’t been able to temper the energy behind a sudden trend in which people are throwing bright-green dildos onto WNBA courts during games. Anger toward cryptocurrency scammers turned into a meme coin called, yes, Green Dildo Coin before these supposed activists extended their protest into basketball arenas and these projectile sex toys.

If we take these bizarro crypto activists at their word, they did not choose WNBA games as the grounds for their protest because they hate women. Logistically, it was a good choice. A basketball arena offers proximity to celebrities that almost nothing else can.

Still, these men thought of the WNBA. Just a few years ago, it would have been nothing more than a punchline to them. We can say that they still are a stain on the game by degrading it with dildos, but it is still something that they know WNBA games are being played in the summer and that they offer a large enough platform to go viral. That awareness came from somewhere.

The crypto activists came to use the WNBA not unlike how it is used by even some of its most fervent fans. Games are the coliseum of internet matters. Cryptocurrency is a digital phenomenon whose fans follow, debate and track it online. The “protest,” to the extent that it worked enough to be considered one, was an extension of a meme coin offered online intended to mock scammers infiltrating the community. By the time a neon sex toy was hurled up and onto the hardwood where popular professional athletes might be objectified by or trip over it, we were neck deep in what one of these activists might call “lore.”

The physical world of Gateway Center Arena in Atlanta or PHX Arena in Arizona was an afterthought. The protestors went to the physical world to play a trick on their internet comrades. On their maps, they circled the WNBA: the first virtual reality sports league.

In the W, the digital world is layered atop the real world. While it can be hard to filter out dildos and crypto tokens from this odd trend, navigating the internetification of fandom is nothing new for the league. Its fans fight culture wars through its players. Because it exists at the intersection of race (a majority Black player pool), gender (the W in WNBA) and class (a constant fight to justify its existence), the WNBA offers a perfect canvas upon which to project a culture war. When Caitlin Clark was drafted in 2024, it merely poured gasoline on that canvas and set the culture wars ablaze.

Depending on where you look and when, WNBA fans online are preoccupied with the romantic relationships between players, beef toward coaches, media bias, or an unceasing narrative painting commissioner Cathy Engelbert as a racist. Like most parasocial internet fandom (think Swifties, Stoolies, or Twitch viewers), there are threads of reality. It was odd the way Engelbert talked about safety in Chicago during All-Star weekend in 2022. Sure enough, Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd have in fact been dating this whole time. Maybe Christine Brennan did cross a line with her obsession toward Clark.

Unlike the long tradition of men’s sports that are passed down through shared experiences, the WNBA came of age after we all had migrated our identities and pastimes to the internet. Nearly every American alive today grew up with at least a tangential tie to the NFL. They attended a game as a child, watched a Super Bowl, or met a local player at a community event. Most WNBA followers, meanwhile, were ingratiated by way of what side they fell on in the Caitlin Culture Wars or whether they bought A’ja Wilson’s shoe. Until recently, even the act of standing up for and enjoying the WNBA signaled that you were likely a liberal engaged deeply in identity politics. By the time they got to the point of buying a ticket, calling an Uber, and sitting down in a stadium seat to watch a WNBA game live at Gateway Center Arena in Atlanta or PHX Arena in Arizona, they were not just a fan but a partisan. They go to the physical world to signal their beliefs to their internet comrades. They are living in a virtual reality.

Fans are, however, pouring into arenas at record rates. They find their favorite players and teams on traditional television at a time when most are content to pirate games or catch up on Instagram. And they do buy signature shoes or branded products more consistently than men’s sports fans. WNBA fandom may often start and be expressed online, but it manifests in the real world beyond the bizarre mad lib of activist, meme coin-driven dildo-throwing.

These internet activists aren’t the first to use the WNBA for pranks, either. In 2023, a right-wing content creator harassed Brittney Griner at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. The YouTuber JiDion was banned last year from all NBA and WNBA events for the hackneyed stunt of sleeping courtside during an Atlanta Dream game. Perhaps the best example of how grifters are using the WNBA for social media stunts is the constant fabrication of quotes attributed to Angel Reese. Because the momentum around the game prevents them from discarding it completely now, some men online have made it their punching bag.

When a figure like Cheryl Reeve calls out the bigotry of the dildo trend, she is trying to address these pranksters and the crypto bros. They probably won’t hear her. The people who will hear think they are on the right side of the issue already. They would never objectify and endanger a woman like that — or be caught looking silly with a sex toy out in public. Still, these people need to hear Reeve too.

They would not objectify Clark or Wilson or their favorite star by reducing them to their bodies. Instead, they turn them into objects upon which to adhere values, politics, and memes. It makes no more sense to a doomscrolling Boomer to hear Clark debated as an overrated, ungrateful “white b*tch” or Wilson as a sh*t-stirrer who wastes Nike’s money than to hear about meme coins and dildos. The people who have staked out their ownership over the WNBA and its characters did not throw anything onto any court, but they planted the seeds out of which the bright green dildos grew.

One problem with drawing any line between these groups is that there is a massive difference between someone who aims to protest crypto scams and someone who aims to create social equity in sports. The latter group is on the right side of the territory it is fighting over. It is in fact deplorable that for two decades, NBA owners ran teams as if they were some kind of noble loss leaders. Wilson and all the Wilsons before her should have been covered and marketed at a level more commensurate with their personality and talent. The people running the WNBA do still, at times, appear incapable of dreaming big enough to make up for all the lost time. The WNBA is something fans should feel good about supporting. What is troubling is when supporters sculpt these ideas into something that puts a fence around the league. The diehards do not know their heroes any more than they can be assured the villains are indeed villains. They maintain that dichotomy in order to define themselves to the rest of the online world. What they are and what they are not.

It is impossible not to hear, in this standoff, echoes of the current political climate. Liberal scolds vs. normie conservatives, truth and morals be damned. The difference here is that sports, somehow, remain a unifier. And somehow, Clark has not only managed to make the marginalized WNBA mainstream, but she brought a whole new type of fan along with her. There is a battle over the center of WNBA fandom. It is not over how to define Clark but whether to accept her community at all, or turn the league into something as polarized as the rest of our world. These sides met one another through viral t-shirts and through avatars on talk shows. They rejected one another before meeting. In the process, they created a fertile ground for everyone else to treat the WNBA as they do. They made it OK to see the league as nothing more than an idea, something to be used and manipulated for any whim.

Perhaps the WNBA would still have registered as the popular thing that would get attention for those crypto protestors this summer. It was just last year that an environmental group glued itself to NBA hoops throughout the spring. A Super Bowl performer brought out a Palestinian flag last February. If you have a message to send, showing out at a live sports event is a great way to make your point. It is not the responsibility of those who have for years spent money and energy supporting their favorite league to combat bad actors.

Some of these goons will never stop. The WNBA can’t help but trigger those who find it funny or offensive that professional women athletes might exist and have fans. But if there is any hope of countering the spirit of someone who would launch a sex toy at a pro athlete and demean a league, one throw at a time, it won’t come from fantasies and conspiracies of a different variety. Nobody wins online. These goons won’t stand down if they continue to see the league and its players as characters in a big, silly game. Too often, even the biggest WNBA fans make them seem like that’s what they are, too.