Wasp season

What to do about the new WNBA fans who seem only interested in having another avenue to be awful to women?

It’s wasp season in Toronto.

If you’re outside in the city, no matter if it’s on your little balcony at 7 a.m. trying to get some reading in before the world comes wide awake, in a park walking over grass that seems both fatigued and extra verdant, in a completely concrete section of downtown at dusk, they are there. They aren’t strictly limited to “outside”, either. I was in a coffee shop where one was bumping up against the front window, repeatedly scaling the pane and then spelunking down it.

They are slow, persistent, flying dully up against arms, legs, hands, feet and faces, taking thwacks and flicks and going tumbling away only to come revving back, incensed. They are flying low in no perceptible direction along sidewalks so you have to watch your feet for fear of stirring to furious a messy cluster of them. They are hanging at eye-level, getting so close the filament hooks of their legs brush against the fine hairs of your face, searching for what — reaction, muscle response — I’m not sure. They are trailing you, idly but unceasing, until they get caught in the slipstream of something else’s body and begin to trail them. Where there is one will soon come two, five, seven more. They will make you give up your space.

They are searching for sustenance to sate their doomed bodies as much as they seem to be searching for confrontation. They remind me of, in this same seasonal moment, a certain new form of WNBA fan.

Is it because the season is almost over, that the trolling, vitriolic takes and replies seem to be in such rapid proliferation? That rather than days for detractors to find the articles, podcasts, or clips of either made aggregate, they will be there within minutes?

Is it a frenzy prefacing a death knell? That because soon the major awards will be announced and there won’t be room to debate on baseless metrics mostly rooted in personal preference (and then, with this group, those preferences based in one’s own ideologies of race, gender, and the darker hierarchies therein) of who is the best, or most deserving, there is now panic? That because, as the postseason begins, it will get all the more difficult to explain away outcome, to deny athletic excellence in favour of personal bias?

I hope so. I hope that in the vacuum comes clarity, since none was provided earlier this week by WNBA Commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, when she was asked about the racist, threatening, misogynistic comments and attention W athletes have fielded from outlier fans this entire season. If not clarity, then the dull drone of hostility, ignorance and hatred present as a trailing refrain since the Draft, without sustenance, goes silent. At least grows thinner.

Sports are made for debate. Streamlined uniformity, which it can feel we’re being accelerated toward in our current algorithmic information age, is dull, numbing. Streamlined fandom is the same. What’s been more jarring to watch is how streamlined hatred has become, and why it’s found such a successful Trojan Horse in fandom.