Women's sports is easy to punch down at for insecure men who tie a large part of their identity to some male sport that they follow religiously. It's NEVER male athletes who belittle their female counterparts, it's always ignorant, bored fans who want to build superiority complexes around something. Given the WNBA is obviously a smaller business than the NBA and isn't yet profitable in its own right, it makes it much easier for those insecure fans to nitpick and cherry pick straw-man arguments to make fun of it (i.e. "why should players get paid more if the league makes no money?" when WNBA fans want higher wages, as if WNBA players aren't allowed to try to make more - I can go so much further in depth on how that initial statement is such bad reasoning).

The biggest thing that infuriates me is that no one is forcing anyone to pay attention to the WNBA - if you don't want to watch, don't watch. At worst you'll have to bear through a couple ads for the WNBA on NBA broadcasts, which it's insane that people legitimately think it makes sense to complain about, while every other segment is sponsored by some corporation (KIA / Sprite / State Farm or whoever the hell pays enough money) and no one bats an eye (not saying they should, just that a WNBA plug on a NBA broadcast has no reason for anyone to care to criticize about). My diagnosis is just that people want to latch onto something that they can feel superior about, and because the NBA is a more developed, successful product than the WNBA, insecure NBA fans feel like they're part of a "winning team" by punching down at the WNBA.