Outlook Women’s Day Special: Crossing Out The 'Femme Fatale'

Dasyu-Sundari. Vishkanya. Seductress. Black-Widow. Characterless. These are not just words; they are cages. For decades, whenever a woman has found herself at the centre of violence, power, survival, or controversy, society has eagerly reached for a sensationalised label. We categorise them to make their existence digestible. We flatten their complexities into recognisable archetypes, and in doing so, we strip them of their humanity, their agency, and their truth.

Nowhere is this dichotomy more glaring than in the story of our cover subject, Phoolan Devi. To those who understood her struggle against an incredibly violent caste and gender hierarchy, she was a true 'Devi', a figure demanding cultural and narrative justice. She was a woman who survived unspeakable brutality and fought back in a language the system understood. But to the establishment, the State, and the masses, she was deliberately reduced to a vengeful, bloodthirsty outlaw. The media played a deeply complicit role in this framing. Newsrooms built her up as a mythological femme fatale of the ravines, a cinematic trope designed to titillate rather than inform. As we note on our story by Zenaira Bakhsh, the press and the public were almost disappointed when they finally saw her: a small woman in a cardigan with wild hair, who entirely defied the hyper-sexualised, cinematic script they had pre-emptively written for her.

As journalists at Outlook, we understand the immense weight our words carry. Every time we write a headline, frame a shot, or structure a debate, we are making a choice. In our pursuit of the truth, we must constantly ask the critical why behind the narratives that take root, and unflinchingly map the axis of power that sustains them. How a story is told determines who is afforded dignity and who is sentenced to the court of public spectacle.

For this Outlook Women’s Day Special, we are crossing out the "Femme Fatale." We are looking past the Roop-ki-Ranis and the Honeymoon-Killers to see the women buried beneath the headlines. The pieces in this issue actively deconstruct the biases that have historically painted women as either pure, unblemished victims or irredeemable temptresses, while exposing the systems that protect the men who abuse them. Crucially, to tell these stories with the integrity they demand, we looked inward. The investigations and essays in this issue are spearheaded entirely by our own roster of dedicated Outlook reporters and contributors, who are holding a mirror up to the very industry we inhabit.

The architecture of these biases often begins in our popular culture. Apeksha Priyadarshini opens the issue by dissecting the cinematic male gaze, exploring how the Indian rape-revenge genre, from Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen to recent blockbusters like Maharaja, historically relies on extreme shock value and voyeurism. Priyadarshini challenges the patriarchal framework that insists on defining a woman's narrative entirely by her trauma, forcing her to bear the burden of the "pure victim" to earn the audience's sympathy. She urges a necessary shift toward stories where the survivor, rather than the violence inflicted upon her, reclaims the focal point and her own agency.

But this gaze is not confined to the silver screen; it thrives in our newsrooms. Holding a mirror directly up to the press, N.K. Bhoopesh examines "The Spectacle of the Woman Accused." Tracing high-profile scandals in Kerala, from the ISRO espionage case of the 1990s to the more recent solar panel and gold smuggling controversies, he highlights how the media consistently weaponises gender. His piece reveals how complex institutional failures and political corruption are frequently overshadowed by lurid public theatre. Instead of interrogating the state, the media reduces the women involved to convenient, sensationalised tropes like the "seductress" or the "foreign spy," ensuring their personal lives are dissected with moral judgment while the systemic rot remains unexamined.

Expanding on this profound critique of media complicity, Lalita Iyer explores "The Hierarchy of Sympathy," questioning why certain crimes ignite national outrage while others dissolve into procedural silence. She exposes how class, caste, and sexuality dictate media empathy. While the brutal 2012 Delhi gang rape galvanised a nation mourning "India's Daughter," Iyer highlights how victims who fall outside normative expectations are denied that collective grief. She points to the dangerous tendency to reduce the identities of queer and trans victims into lurid headlines, focusing on the "transgender angle", rather than recognising and reporting on the systemic, targeted violence against them.

Building directly on these stark disparities, Fozia Yasin takes us to the ground in Hathras to expose the brutal anatomy of this hierarchy in action. Her devastating report documents how the horrific caste-based sexual violence against a 19-year-old Dalit woman was actively rewritten by newsrooms into a sensationalized "love affair" and a political conspiracy. The media abandoned the truth for a profitable fiction, violently stripping away a grieving family's dignity to feed primetime spectacles. It is a sobering reminder that when the victim does not fit the media's palatable, dominant-caste mould, the press will actively conspire to put her character on trial instead of her murderers.

These featured pieces, however, are just a glimpse into the broader conversation taking place across this edition. Throughout the many more articles compiled in this special issue, our newsroom continues to pull the thread on how society consumes, commodifies, and condemns the women who make headlines. From deep-dive investigations into procedural injustices to essays that reclaim stolen narratives, the remaining pages are a testament to the fact that violence against women is not just an act, it is an ongoing broadcast that we must actively choose to rewrite.

It is a demand from newsrooms to change the lens through which we view women in the crosshairs of society. It is time to unlearn the labels, dismantle the archetypes, and refuse the sensationalised bait.