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?
The first time someone threw a sex toy onto the court, during a July 29 game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream, many players were inclined to say Yes, we can laugh about this. Sydney Colson of the Indiana Fever joked about it on Twitter, as did Angel Reese. And why not? As a bizarre one-off, it’s easy enough to laugh. Dildos, especially the ones that aim for anatomical fidelity, are funny objects when they appear somewhere you don’t expect to see one.
Then it happened again, and again, and again, and it’s now clear that the real joke is supposed to be: women playing basketball. The actual punchline is: women. Haha.
It’s possible this is the oldest form of humor we have. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve noted to reporters that the sexualization of women has “been going on for centuries,” and the same can be said for claiming it’s all in good fun. So far, this does seem to be the defense of the two people who are facing legal trouble in relation to the dildo throwing. Eighteen-year-old Kayden Lopez, who was arrested after throwing one at a Phoenix Mercury game on August 5, claimed it was “a stupid prank.” Delbert Carver, a 23-year-old who was arrested following the first incident at Gateway Center Arena, allegedly told police “this was supposed to be a joke [that was] supposed to go viral.”
It’s that last part, the fact that it was meant to go viral, in addition to online betting platform Polymarket offering odds on when it will happen again, and a crypto enthusiast claiming to be part of a group orchestrating the events in order to market their memecoin, that makes it tempting to imagine this phenomenon is something new, rather than very old. This is an easy mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless.
Writing in The Guardian, Lee Escobedo 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.
According to Katie Kadue, misogyny is structured like a joke. I could also add that it’s enacted like a prank, and transmitted like a meme. Take this one Donald Trump Jr. posted, where his dad is standing on the roof of the White House, throwing a green dildo at a bunch of WNBA players below him. He captioned it “Posted without further comment,” plus some cry-laughing emojis. Is this a joke, by any common understanding of what that entails? No, but that’s not the point. The audience for this isn’t people who like jokes, or even understand what they are or why other people like them. The audience is boys and men who will understand that what’s funny is: women.
I have a really hard time being asked, again and again, to take this shit.
