Too much man! Too much woman! Are you on a Goldilocks quest?!
Taapsee Pannu and Imane Khelif have in common? Answer: the Indian actor and the Algerian boxer have both been targeted by misogynists at the Paris Olympics, although for reasons that are poles apart.
Khelif is being humiliated by a global army of trolls — including the most famous troll of all, Harry Potter author JK Rowling — who have been questioning her identity as a woman after a match in which she made short shrift of her Italian opponent. She is a man disguised as a woman, they alleged.
Pannu, meanwhile, was criticised after visuals emerged of her lustily cheering Indian badminton players coached by her husband, Mathias Boe. She distracted them, she obstructed spectators' view, she's an attention-seeker, she is a panauti (ill-omen), she is unpatriotic — the list of charges against her on social media was long.
As an outspoken woman, Pannu is no stranger to insults from conservatives and chauvinists. Coincidentally, her oeuvre is no stranger to debates around gender in sport. In 2021, Pannu starred in Akarsh Khurana's Hindi film Rashmi Rocket, as an athlete who was banned from racing when she was found to have unusually high testosterone levels.
Her character, Rashmi Vira, is subjected to invasive tests, the results are tomtommed in the news, while she is not offered any counselling by India's athletics association, and she ultimately sues them. Rashmi's story is set in the same period that real-life international medal-winning Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred from competing for a similar reason, and
