Latest news with #dildo
Yahoo
09-08-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Polymarket slammed for ‘disrespectful' dildo throwing bets after second man is arrested at WNBA game
Critics are calling out Polymarket after it promoted bets on whether or not Women's pro basketball games will be interrupted by someone in the crowd throwing a dildo onto the court. 'Announcing: Dildo dailies,' the Polymarket Sports X account posted on Wednesday. 'You can now bet on which day(s) dildos will hit the WNBA court.' So far, bettors have traded almost $500,000 worth of bets on which games will be interrupted by sex toys being hurdled at the female athletes, even going as far as to bet on the colour of the martial aids. Yet many were not enthused by the new opportunity. 'This is so disrespectful to the women professionals who play in the WNBA,' one person said in response to the post. 'Imagine this was your daughter or sister and they played in the WNBA and this was being done at their games.' 'This type of stuff literally incentivises people to throw dildos onto the court,' said another. Viral trend It comes after a man was arrested at a Phoenix Mercury game on August 5 after throwing a dildo towards the court, allegedly hitting a man and his nine-year-old niece. It's the second arrest since July 29, when a sex toy was first thrown onto the court during a Women's National Basketball Association game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream. The promotion of betting surrounding the sexist trend could encourage even more copycat incidents, critics say. Both arrested alleged dildo throwers said they pulled the stunts in an attempt to go viral on social media. Polymarket declined a request for comment. To be sure, Polymarket isn't the only platform letting users bet on WNBA games being disrupted by sex toys. BetOnline, an online gambling firm that was among the first to let gamblers bet with Bitcoin in its online poker rooms, also offers a range of similar dildo-based bets. More controversy Polymarket jumping on the dildo throwing trend also feeds into claims that crypto has a misogyny problem. A 2024 report from Association for Women in Cryptocurrency found that 82% of approximately 400 women surveyed believed the industry is not free from harassment. Multiple women have spoken out about alleged sexual misconduct and said the crypto industry suffers from a culture of sexism. It's also another setback for Polymarket, which has been hit by several controversies in recent months. In June, bettors came to blows over the disputed outcome of a betting market that asked if Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky had worn a suit. In January, the betting platform faced backlash after it let users gamble on the level of destruction wrought by the California wildfires. Running interference In addition to disrespecting players, some have pointed out that the dildo-throwing markets could easily be manipulated. 'What would stop someone from making a bet then going to a game to throw said dildo on the court for the win?' one onlooker pointed out. 'We're entering the stage where prediction market bettors don't just predict outcomes, they interfere to make them happen,' John Wang, a crypto founder, said on X. The activity echoes previous viral crypto trends that have encouraged and rewarded reckless and outrageous behaviour. In November, a middle-school student went viral after netting $30,000 from a memecoin 'rugpull' on and raising his middle fingers to those he had just burned. The same month, a man livestreaming on faked his suicide in an attempt to promote his memecoin. Tim Craig is DL News' Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@ Sign in to access your portfolio
The Guardian
09-08-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
The WNBA's sex toy epidemic is Skibidi brainrot writ large. Trolling has replaced meaning with noise
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.
The Independent
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Donald Trump Jr posts meme showing his father throwing sex toy onto WNBA court
Donald Trump Jr has taken to Instagram to post a meme of his father, President Donald Trump, throwing a green dildo from the White House roof. 'Posted without further comment,' the president's eldest son wrote in the caption accompanying the photoshopped image, which brings together Trump's unexpected appearance on the roof overlooking his new patio makeover of the Rose Garden on Tuesday with six female basketball players shooting hoops. Don Jr's meme appeared to be referencing an incident at a WNBA game last week when a dildo was pitched onto the court in the middle of a game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream. The prank led Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham to plead with fans not to bombard the players with sex toys, only to avoid being hit with one herself earlier this week narrowly. While Don Jr's post had accumulated almost 107,000 likes at the time of writing, it was also met with criticism and condemnation. 'So funny! Now RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES,' its top comment read, according to Mediaite. 'Remember these are the same people who bash trans people because they care about 'women's sports'. Er, ok,' wrote former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan when the meme was recirculated on X. Don Jr has a long track record of posting memes, often to troll his father's political enemies or comment on contemporary culture war issues. Late last month, he posted an AI image of his father in tight denim to satirize the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans furore, commenting, in homage to Zoolander: 'That Hanse…. Um, Donald is so hot right now!!!' He has previously drawn fire for posting a fake image of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing lingerie to send up her hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, D.C., in 2022.
Daily Mail
08-08-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Riley Gaines jokes Donald Trump can stop WNBA's sex toy scandal after his latest immigration numbers
After another night of of sex toys being thrown onto WNBA courts, Riley Gaines has suggested that Donald Trump might be the man to fix the problem. The WNBA appears to be at a complete loss over how to stop the problem. On Thursday night, two more incidents occurred - one dildo landed by the Atlanta Dream bench during the game against Chicago Sky while another was thrown onto the court. Cryptocurrency traders have claimed responsibility. Gaines, who is best known in the sporting world for her campaigning against trans athletes in women's sports, has now suggested that if President Trump can stop illegal immigrants crossing the border, he can sort the WNBA out too. The OutKick podcast host said: 'Major, major numbers from the Trump administration reporting that the past three months, there have been zero immigrant to cross the border illegally, which is fantastic news. 'So, in looking at these headlines, looking at the WNBA, there have been more green dildos thrown on the court at WNBA games than there have been illegal crossings at the border in the past three months.' Gaines reposted the clip of her comments on X and added: 'Insane but 100% fantastic statistics.' Insane but 100% factual statistic lol — Riley Gaines (@Riley_Gaines_) August 7, 2025 Ironically, her comments come as Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr, posted a meme on Instagram that jokingly showed the President himself was throwing the objects onto the court. 'Posted without further comment,' Trump Jr wrote with three crying-with-laughter emojis. But in women's basketball, players and coaches are starting to get deeply frustrated by the ongoing situation. Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham got hit on the ankle earlier in the week by a sex toy thrown from the stands after pleading for it to stop, while Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve went further in angry comments to the media on Thursday. 'This has been going on for centuries. The sexualization of women, this is the latest version of that. It's not funny,' Reeve said. 'It should not be a butt of jokes on any radio show, or in print, or in any comments. The sexualization of women is what's used to hold women down and this is no different. 'This is just the latest story, and we should write about it in that way. These people that are doing this should be held accountable. We're not the butt of the joke. They're the problem, and we need to take action.' Reeve's Lynx team are back in action in Minnesota on Friday night against the Washington Mystics, while Dallas Wings host New York Liberty in the league's other game. Riley Gaines has been a strong Trump supporter, especially backing his trans athlete stance There have been two arrests over the incidents so far, but it still doesn't seem to be deterring people. 18-year-old Kaden Lopez was booked into jail in Arizona on suspicion of disorderly conduct, assault and public display of explicit sexual material following the game between the Phoenix Mercury and the Connecticut Sun. In Georgia, a man was also arrested after the initial incident at an Atlanta Dream game last week.
The Guardian
08-08-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
The WNBA's sex toy epidemic is Skibidi brainrot writ large. Trolling has replaced meaning with noise
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, 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.
