A closed loop

Why women don't have the luxury of "sticking to sports", Michael Porter Jr.'s dangerous ignorance, and the recent weaponized misogyny at W games.

Imagine, for a moment, there was a WNBA athlete as expressively, boastfully, indulgently dumb as Michael Porter Jr.

Someone who monetized their ignorance in the form of a podcast with other notable athletes, who framed their ignorance as freedom. Who appeared to favour stoking ignorance not for its inevitable engagement and aggregation, because that would require a level of strategic thinking, but because operating within ignorance offers a ready void in which to vacuum any and all attempts at rationality. Any criticisms, any pointing out contradictions or falsehoods, suctioned into this gaping vortex and nullified.

Someone who used said podcast to lurch between topics like child sex trafficking, cancel culture, the danger of pride parades, believing conspiracy theories “a little bit”, why it’s cool to be cancelled because then you’re free, the Olympics dissing Jesus (?), the devil using social media to create narratives, and the apocalypse — all within 12 minutes. Wholly perfunctory, nothing tangible, only a brain-numbing jumble that roves lightly and luxuriates in its own voice as it lays right-wing keywords and themes on the altar of the most simultaneously self-conscious and temper-tantrum furious corner of the internet.

A person who invoked, lightly, misogynistic — or in this imagining, misandristic, but potentially misogynistic too — tenets to test partners, who openly discussed the merits of doing so. Who borrowed from an inherently narrow, noxious perspective in hopes of opening up and clarifying the beliefs and moral convictions of another person instead of simply asking. Who seemed to enjoy the safety provided by the theoretical framework of other intolerant, small-minded people, so they themselves did not have to expound or come up with anything that might mistakenly glance at original thought. Who did not have the bravery or depth of understanding for that.

Someone who did all this and was still considered viable, even important, to the league, their teammates, to a brand new fanbase and front office enough to pick up the two years and $38.3 million remaining on their contract.

You can’t. There is no such painfully, fucking dumb person as that in the W. There is no luxury, no enabling of space that would allow for an athlete there to clog such a singularly ignorant lane while competing at the bare minimum and still find themselves secure on a franchise’s payroll.

Reasons range in ideology and practice but the overarching mainstay is duality — the double-selves players in the W must operate as. To be not a great athlete but an excellent one; to be excellent and to also be compelling; to be compelling as well as outspoken; outspoken and educated; educated and still funny, still relatable, still stylish, still interesting, still culturally considered appealing (physically, and in your character), still likeable, still, still, still.

There is no freedom in the W to just be a jock, to embody the trope of it in arduous or joyful physical practice by stubbornly adhering to the work, to the game of it all. There is certainly no freedom to adopt the jock’s stereotypical mental traits — which is how I’ve seen some justify Porter Jr.’s perspective — and exist in a public-facing singular focus, to get asked about something that doesn’t have to do with basketball and have the easy, assumptive freedom to shrug, to say they don’t really think about it. There is always the “What else?”

This duality holds off the court, but tends to be restrictive, even punitive. Like Porter Jr., plenty of W players have podcasts, but none bumble so pointedly into such socially charged subjects. If players dwell on the inter-personal relationships or drama of the league, on court or off, they’ll get labelled as gossipy, educationally useless to fans. If they sway the other way, as Sophie Cunningham has on her podcast Show Me Something where she’s criticized refs and walked through sequences leading to questionable calls, there’s direct league intervention. Courtney Williams and Natisha Heidman’s StudBudz has been a revelation, but because it primarily streams on Twitch there’s a fleeting sense to it, cursory, not sitting quite so solid in the crowded athlete podcast ecosystem. Perhaps by design

Cunningham’s been fined three times for her comments on officiating, but they haven’t strictly been complaints. Cunningham’s anchored her accusations in the concept of labour — a top-of-mind concern for players as they renegotiate their CBA with the league. Again, here is the requisite duality of a W player at work. Unlike the many NBA players who rail against the same officiating biases and blips in their games on their podcasts, Cunningham can’t just complain. There needs to be an underlying reason; preferably a noble and high-minded one.

Porter’s garbling, in contrast, makes no such claim. His comments (take your pick: his weakness being sins of the flesh, the onus of fault on women for ostensibly walking around; misogyny as icebreaker; not being in favour of pay equity for W athletes; calling women “females”, in general, ever) either hang vapid or fall flat and heavy where he leaves them. The best podcasts strike a difficult balance between confidence of message and internally questioning whether any person wants to listen, with the latter point, hopefully, routinely interrogated via gut-checks by hosts and producers. Porter Jr. has no such bullshit detector. Only he could tell you what illuminating wisdoms he believes to be extending, though he’d need to make a single succinct point first.

I drive this particular point so crudely home because it illuminates the crucial difference in the singular freedom male athletes, certainly NBA players, have to bodily take up one lane at a time — even if it’s a terrible one — while women must split themselves. Must proved to be many-faceted on all fronts. Women don’t get to, at least not yet, stick to sports.

As many as five rubber phalluses have been hurled from the stands of WNBA games to the floor and at players over the last month, with two arrests thus far. There have been many excellent pieces written about the dildos whipped on court, and if this particularly idiotic terrorizing has eluded you, Ben Pickman did a tireless bit of reporting on it that I still marvel at him having the patience to put down. I don’t want to delve much farther into it beyond the precise, exacting sensation in each of these acts which is: a man grabbing a woman by the shoulders, or forcing her head with a propulsive palm, and hissing, Look.

Look at how I’ve forced you to see that this space you inhabit professionally cannot exist in the singular, cannot be just what it is for. Look how I’ve made it my platform, my reckoning, my gesture. Look who is on my side. Look how vulnerable you are, even where you feel yourself to be the strongest, the most capable. Look at how I’ve reduced you to me, a dangling appendage, this lack. Look at my autonomy, most powerful when I force you to consider the absence of your own. Look.

I refuse to call it trolling because the word is meant to smooth over severity, to mislead and make light of these actions for their absurdity over the reality of their psychic weight, steeped in this festering cultural moment. It’s the same way I refuse to ignore Porter Jr. as annoying anomaly when he has so crudely co-opted the word curious (his podcast is called Curious Mike). While I don’t assign the dudes smuggling dildos into games to throw them onto court and Porter Jr. with very high-stakes intelligence, I also don’t underestimate the underlying collective consciousness for which they feel propelled and vindicated by.

The misogyny and ignorance therein is nothing new. What Porter Jr. parrots and what weaponizing women’s sexuality by hurling rubber dicks does is not shocking, these are just rebranding of tropes as old as time, as old as the practice of hating and blaming women. But they also represent, in frightening real time, what the lack of critical thinking and understand bring — especially against the backdrop of decimating formalized cultural criticism with the firing of so many political, media and arts critics.

Every episode of Porter Jr’s podcast gets a little fringier, a little less compelled to cite or discuss sources for the ignorance on offer. If the early episodes were breezy chats with former teammates like Aaron Gordon, the swerve since tracks exactly on the same hard-to-right trajectory much of the Western world finds itself. As he settled into his little vacuum, it first seemed fine to believe he was kind of just talking to himself, but voids expand. People are listening to this shit and the mantle of self-importance Porter Jr. has bestowed on himself in the absence of argument, or logic, or minor inconvenience of critical thought as he subverts in practice and definition what it means to be curious presents as aspirational to many of them.

Curiosity is open-ended, flowing out and out and out. It’s lively, orchestral. Opposite, entirely, to Porter Jr. and his ilk’s one-note thinking. Curiosity also suggests reconciliation: intellectually, the closing of a knowledge gap, or bridging a social one. It’s active, probing, bright. Porter Jr. steeps in ignorance with a dull-eyed, sated smugness. His “curiosity” — whether this particular brand of the sports manosphere, those who abide by identity politics, or right leaning trolls — is weaponized. When it asks it actually tells, fumes if the answer isn’t what it wants. A closed loop. It also hides behind the asking a practiced, retaliatory vehemence. Mocking via the canned, I’m just asking questions! with hands up in feigned surrender, reptile grin.

It’s harsh, maybe, to come down this hard on someone for who maybe a decade ago we’d allow their ignorance, knowing it was its own self-imposing set of restrictions. Either something to grow out of or a clumsy, limiting cross to bear. But if a person who’s subsisted on the same wash of right-leaning rhetoric, absurdist memes and nihilism that inform Porter Jr.’s publicly held thoughts, or inform the impulse to claim targeted misogyny for crypto, can go in the fine light of quiet morning and gun down children, it’s violently clear there is weight to this ignorance. There’s shape, propulsion, and clear intention. The harm comes now in shrugging it off.