In today’s edition: the mayor on the ground in D.C., some projects to add to your streaming watchlist, and women’s sports have come too far to be the butt of a joke.
– Game time. For the past two weeks, WNBA games have been interrupted. Sex toys have been thrown on the court in the middle of matchups between the Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries, New York Liberty and Dallas Wings, Phoenix Mercury and Connecticut Sun, and more.
At first, it seemed like a well-intentioned, if mildly dangerous, prank. The WNBA is made up of many queer women, and coming from a fan, it could have been something of an inside joke. But as the incidents racked up, players started to be less amused. The police have even gotten involved, with an arrest in Phoenix and the NYPD searching for a suspect in New York. It became decidedly less funny when a cryptocurrency group claimed responsibility for some of the incidents, saying they were intended to market a new coin. This was “marketing” going for a shock factor at the expense of a growing game—one that’s still in the middle of figuring out how to market itself.
It was almost a physical manifestation of what the WNBA has been going through over the past year. As the league surged in popularity, it attracted a host of new viewers who didn’t always come in good faith. They directed racist commentary toward players online, among other incidents. For players, it was an at times difficult departure from the safe environment of hardcore, devoted fans that the league attracted when it was less popular.
But the demeaning nature of these stunts—men throwing sex toys to disrupt arguably the most successful women’s sports league—is somehow worse. For years, one of the biggest problems facing women’s sports was that they weren’t “cool.” Girls played sports growing up, but lost interest when they hit their teen years. On the professional side, women’s teams had to contend with not only less funding and less media coverage, but media attention that was sometimes actively hostile to their success. Last year, when I wrote a feature story for Fortune about the growth of the WNBA, longtime star Sue Bird analyzed this problem for me.
“I’ve used this term ‘cool factor,'” she told me last year, well before the sex toy incidents. “For some reason, we got put in the ‘not cool’ category. It was easy to have us be the butt of the joke on SNL, it was easy to have dudes walk around and be like, ‘I could take them.’ It seeped into our society.”
These stunts attempt to make women’s sports the butt of the joke again. And we’ve come too far to let that happen. The WNBA is an eight-figure business, whose players are superstars with die-hard fandoms, earning multimillion-dollar endorsement deals. Celebrities sit courtside. A viral t-shirt from the brand Togethxr that says “everybody watches women’s sports” made women’s sports not just popular, but ubiquitous, part of the air we breathe.
Bird told me last year that she never let the jokes get to her during the two decades she played. “I knew it wasn’t true,” she said. “There were a thousand reasons—attendance, companies paying us thousands of dollars to represent them. So you can’t tell me there’s no value in our country for women’s basketball players.”
Fans are seeing through these stunts. And players have been speaking up, especially as the incidents have become more dangerous with players and fans in danger of getting hit by an object hurtling through the air. The writer Frankie de la Cretaz wrote last week that these stunts are about power. I’ll say, they’re about who gets to drive culture—and who’s the punchline. This time, the difference is women’s sports have their own media ecosystem and fans. Those who want to turn women’s basketball into a joke will simply be drowned out.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
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MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Life360 promoted Lauren Antonoff to CEO.
Lisa Coffey joins iHeartMedia as chief business officer.
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ON MY RADAR
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PARTING WORDS
"Most people can only handle one side of a public figure. They can’t handle a whole person. I kind of describe it as a hexagon. We’re all hexagons. We all have multiple sides, multiple facets."
—Lee Tilghman, who was one of the first successful Instagram influencers. Her new book is about the reality—and downsides—of influencing.
