Good news: men have stopped disrupting women’s sport with dildos. Bad news: now they’re betting on their periods | Arwa Mahdawi

Forget the bald eagle or the Statue of Liberty – the best symbol of modern America may well be a neon green dildo. Women’s basketball fans will know exactly what I’m talking about. On 29 July, a brightly coloured sex toy was thrown on to the court during the final minutes of play in a WNBA game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream. In the weeks that followed, more neon dildos were flung at female basketball players, with at least six WNBA games disrupted.

The culprits were reportedly members of a cryptocurrency group trying to boost a memecoin called Green Dildo Coin. It was all very 2025: brainrot stunts, get-rich-quick schemes and memeified misogyny. And, of course, the Trump family joined in. Donald Trump Jr, who fancies himself an edgelord, posted a crude meme of his dad throwing a green dildo on to a court of young, female basketball players.

Thanks to a couple of arrests and threats of perpetrators being banned from games, dildo-flinging has now died down. However, women’s basketball is still attracting a lot of toxic attention. The latest indignity professional players are being forced to put up with? Period betting: gamblers are trying to figure out where a player is in her menstrual cycle and are predicting her athletic performance accordingly.

It’s hard to know just how widespread the phenomenon is, but Wired recently reported that an increasing number of sports betting influencers are sharing their tips on the strategy. One Instagram user called fademebets, for example, published a video of basketball star Caitlin Clark earlier this year where he announced: “She is on the end of her late luteal phase, meaning a decrease in cardio, decrease in strength, decrease in aerobic system. She’s going to be tired more often than in a normal game.”

How on earth would some random internet user know where a professional athlete is in her cycle? Most of the time it seems they are just guessing. On the podcast Stuff Island, comedian James McCann said he had met a gambler who used injury reports, including references to “soreness”, to estimate menstrual cycles. Give it some time, however, and perhaps they’ll start hacking commercial period tracking apps, many of which already leak sensitive user data. Earlier this year, for example, a federal jury found that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act by collecting data from Flo, a popular period tracking app, without user consent.

While period cycle betting is invasive and creepy, these gamblers aren’t entirely off-base in their reasoning: your menstrual cycle can have an impact on your athletic performance. Indeed, researchers at University College London just published a study that found female athletes have faster reaction times during ovulation. Perhaps, if we’re looking for silver linings, there is some positive benefit to men getting interested in luteal phases and women’s hormone levels. Perhaps if we get enough gamblers deciding there is money to be made from this, we’ll see more resources go towards women’s health, which is chronically underfunded? Humour me here: I’m trying to be positive. It’s difficult, but I’m trying.

If we are really trying to look on the bright side, the rise of period betting points to just how popular women’s sports are becoming. Women’s football, for example, already one of the top 10 most followed sports globally, is on track to become one of the top five sports by 2030, according to Nielsen Sports. And, halfway through the 2025 season, WNBA ratings are breaking records and drawing in a broader fanbase. The New York Times reports that the number of boys under 18 who watch WNBA has grown by 130% over the past four years.

Whenever women are in the spotlight, though, there are people who punish them for it. The joy and excitement of the Women’s World Cup in 2023, for example, was overshadowed by Luis Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish Football Federation, kissing Spain forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent. It “stained one of the happiest days of my life”, Hermoso said at the time. And there was a record number of reports of abuse at matches in English football during the 2024-25 season, according to data from Kick It Out; complaints of misogyny and sexism drove this increase. Whether it’s sexist chants, dildo tossing or period cycle betting, the world is full of small men desperate to spoil a woman’s big moment.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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