The WNBA's sex toy epidemic is Skibidi brainrot writ large. Trolling has replaced meaning with noise

The Guardian

4 days ago

The first dildo dropped from the sky like a glitch in the matrix. For anyone tuned in to the 29 July game between the Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries, the initial reaction was disbelief. In a world where feeds are increasingly AI-generated and algorithmically tuned for confusion, the boundaries between real and unreal have softened into clay. Our senses, once reliable, now compete with simulation. What does it mean when dildos become airborne at WNBA games? Not once, not twice, but repeatedly? Protest? Performance art? Or just another malformed blip in the automated dreamscape we scroll through daily?
Two men have been arrested thus far in these grotesque affronts. One was 18, the other 23, part of Gen Z, the prime consumer of debased meme culture. Authorities have not identified suspects in the most recent two dildo-throwing incidents. However, Delbert Carver, a 23-year-old man, was arrested in connection with the first incident during a WNBA game in Atlanta. According to ESPN, Carver may face charges of disorderly conduct, public indecency or indecent exposure and criminal trespass. In an affidavit, he allegedly admitted that the act was 'supposed to be a joke' and intended 'to go viral'.
When dildos become airborne at WNBA games more than once, the meaning shifts. It reveals the collapse of coherence under TikTok's attention economy. These aren't protests or insults that make a point. They're spectacles. The goal is to provoke. In a memetic landscape poisoned by irony, absurdity is the point. The dildo isn't symbolic. Its function is noise.
Philosopher Guy Debord would be shocked at how on the nose we have become. His work argued we live in a 'society of the spectacle,' where life is mediated through image, and authenticity is replaced by performance. Today, women's sports are doubly mediated, first through the lens of athletic competition, then through the social gaze that still questions their legitimacy. Laura Mulvey's theory of the 'male gaze' further sharpens this: Women, particularly in visual media, are often positioned not as agents but as objects. In this context, female athletes are not merely participants in a game. They're props in someone else's viral moment. The dildo becomes mise-en-scène.
But this isn't just theoretical. It's real. So is the disrespect. The dildo is a weaponized farce. It's thrown not just to interrupt but to dominate the narrative, to remind players that their gender, their careers and their stage remain vulnerable to mockery. It stops the game. Hijacks it, even. And reasserts the notion, violent and comical, that women's achievements exist on borrowed time within a culture still conditioned to belittle them.
So far, the suspects in these cases are part of Gen Z, a generation raised in and by the internet. Their actions cannot be dismissed as isolated provocations. They must be contextualized within TikTok's cultural logic, or worse, the absurdist ethos of 'Skibidi Toilet'. If you are a normally functioning adult with a job, you might ask, 'What is Skibidi Toilet?' Skibidi Toilet is a viral animated web series featuring surreal, low-resolution battles between human heads protruding from toilets and humanoid characters with surveillance equipment for heads. Glitchy visuals, overstimulating pacing, and meme loops create a vibe without meaning.
But to understand these trolls' intentions, and see the direction society is headed, we must contextualize them within TikTok's cultural logic. The garish green dildo mirrors the surreal, low-fi, uncanny aesthetic of Skibidi Toilet or any number of algorithm-fueled meme cycles. The dildo is an anti-symbol. Its meaning is its absurdity. Skibidi brainrot encapsulates a generation fluent in irony but starved for meaning. The dildo is funny not because it says something, but because it says nothing. It's the irrational object breaking into a space of rationality.
This kind of hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online. Their minds normalize prank-as-expression. In this context, throwing a dildo on to the court during a WNBA game isn't just an act of crude rebellion. It sadly mirrors the Skibidi Toilet ethos: low-effort disruption cloaked in irony, where the gesture is meant to be meaningless and provocative at once. As traditional signifiers of rebellion (punk, political protest, counterculture) fade or fragment in the digital noise, young men are absorbing frameworks of meaninglessness, where 'funny = power' and shock is its own reward.
Furthering the chronically online element of all this, in the last two days, a crypto memecoin group has claimed credit for the recent dildo-throwing incidents at WNBA games, reframing what seemed like rogue trolling as a deliberate guerrilla marketing stunt. The group, which openly mocks the league and brags about not watching women's sports, celebrated the act online as a victory. If true, this spectacle is engineered by people who understand that visibility matters more than meaning in an algorithm-driven culture.
This is how meme culture is rotting America: not from the inside, but from online. The internet's lack of regulation is its greatest strength and its most dangerous flaw. It allows once-fringe ideologies and juvenile impulses to scale without resistance. Ideas that would have died in solitude or been challenged in a public square now find shelter in forums and meme loops, rewarded by engagement. In this new economy of attention, even humiliation has utility. We're left with a culture where trolling becomes its own form of marketing.
How did we arrive at this level of collective debasement? Despite living in an era of unprecedented digital access, over half of American adults (54%) read below a sixth-grade level, and 21% are considered illiterate as of 2022. This foundational deficit in literacy undermines a person's ability to evaluate online messages critically. Thus, a generation raised on irony struggles to decode satire, or even manipulation. Back in 2013, 66% of fourth graders couldn't read proficiently. It was a warning sign that today's adults would fail to distinguish viral provocation from genuine meaning. Online, many young people now build identity from meme fragments, unconsciously mimicking behavior they don't fully understand. Lacking media literacy, they become perfect vessels for cultural incoherence.
All of this really boils down to the death of shame within society. And it starts at the top. Donald Trump's most enduring legacy isn't a policy but a persona as the shameless troll who made humiliation a political strategy. His constant provocation and gleeful disdain for norms created a playbook both parties use now. Liberals respond with faux-moral outrage, conservatives with Nietzschean bravado, but the end result is the same: a culture addicted to performance, where shame is no longer a deterrent.
This logic has trickled down into every corner of public life through race, class, gender and especially online culture, where symbolic acts of ressentiment become viral currency. The dildo thrown at a women's basketball game isn't just a crude joke but a memeified act of humiliation. It doesn't challenge power on any level, it just wants attention. And in a culture without shame, the humiliation sticks to the target, not the perpetrator. In this case, the WNBA players themselves.
The fact that these incidents have popped up simultaneously across the country, from New York to Atlanta to Chicago, shows that the lack of shame is collective, bipartisan and here to stay. This is where we are: everything is bait. We've collapsed the distinction between trolling and activism, and so we land – like the dildo itself – on the bottom of the floor, laughing, recording, retweeting, but never asking what it says about who we've become.