Gossip around Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers’s relationship misreads the WNBA

To a large degree, the surge of interest in the love lives of WNBA players is fueled by social media. It’s never been so easy to hop on your phone, type in an athlete’s name, and find no shortage of posts speculating about their social life. Parasocial relationships are simpler than ever to form; Instagram and TikTok, which are popular with WNBA players, make such attachments even easier.

Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers during their time at UConn. Photograph: Daniel Passapera/NCAA Photos/Getty Images

But there’s also something else at work, says Dr Alicia Smith-Tran, an associate professor of sociology and comparative American studies at Oberlin College. “Obviously, the status of women’s sports is elevating,” says Smith-Tran, who played on Oberlin’s basketball team as an undergraduate. But despite the surge in popularity of leagues such as the WNBA, she says “women who are professional athletes continue to be seen as lesser than their male counterparts”.

The focus on the romantic lives of players “is kind of a manifestation of how women athletes continue to be marginalized, and the focus is taken off their skills and contributions in the workplace,” Smith-Tran adds. In short, it’s “another way that women athletes are being painted as less worthy, or less talented, when compared to men”. They become the object of gossip columns rather than sports columns.

The public’s resistance to seeing women as athletes in the same way we view their male counterparts is due to the fact that culturally, “we tend to see athleticism as a masculine trait,” says Smith-Tran.

That’s especially true for basketball, which requires attributes – such as height and strength – that don’t neatly square with how most of us frame femininity. NBA stars like LeBron James and Steph Curry also have romantic relationships – notably, not same-sex ones – “but that’s kind of just a nice side fact that we know about them, compared to seeing [what happens] with women in the WNBA, where the focus [may be] on their relationship first – and then we watch and see if they prove themselves as athletes who are worthy in the same way.”

There’s another problem with the conversations around romance in the WNBA: they contribute to the fetishization of queer couples and relationships. Whether Fudd and Bueckers are still in a relationship is a side point; what’s more relevant is the exoticization of the idea that they may be.

“I think the idea of two superstars of a sports league potentially being in a relationship with each other plays into so many tropes from people’s favorite romance novels, and it can be easy to get carried away in the fantasy,” says De la Cretaz.

This was highlighted during the frenzy around the gay ice hockey drama Heated Rivalry.

“All too often, queer relationships are fetishized and dehumanized, becoming fodder for people to project their own desires on to,” says De la Cretaz. “The problem, however, is that Paige and Azzi are not characters in a novel; they are real people and these are their actual lives.”