To Men Who Write Women Off

“Women feel differently, so they talk differently, have a different relationship to words and to ideas of which these are the vehicle. Asserting difference at the same time as demanding equal rights is obviously the position to take. We must impose female cultural models, which have a universal value in a world where ‘universal’ equals ‘masculine’. In other words, cultivate marginality until the margin takes up half the page. We have a long way to go...”

—Marina Yaguello, French linguist

Behind me, everything. The love, the hate, the people, the places, the moments and the memory, the issues I curated, the resentment against me, the truth and the lies, the sadness and the humour, the excitement and the anguish, the despair and the redemption, the possibilities and the impossibilities, the right and the wrong, the many betrayals, criticism, judgements.

Ahead of me, a long road. A road that I will take unapologetically. Now that I finally know what it means to be a woman in a man’s world.

It isn’t an equal life but keep fighting for your place.

That’s what my mother tells me and I believe, her mother and many more mothers have told their daughters the same if they willed their daughters to carry on with being who they are. Women, uninterrupted.

In a world of men, women have to redraw the maps if they are to find their place.

Everyday sexism is an old establishment. It will rot in its own time. Women have been fighting against it for long. The dismantling of structures takes time. In the meanwhile, women must keep cultivating marginality until that fills the page. We must write our stories.

I am not a puppet. I have been called that.

So, that’s that.

I am a feminist.

I am a woman and the first-ever woman editor of Outlook Magazine. In fact, when I had been asked to lead the newsroom, there weren’t many women editors that were leading newsrooms here.

I am particularly fascinated by the amount of interest in my life and not in my work. I am even more fascinated by the way they write about a woman like me.

Men, you know, they write women off. I have been tagged as “volatile” and having “mood swings” but men and the enablers of patriarchy have always used those terms for women just trying to do their job.

Yes, I like poetry. I like art. I like what I like. I do what I do.

My first cover at Outlook Magazine was an image of a cracked foot of an installation by Mumbai-based artist Prabhakar Kamble.

“Here, the cracked foot symbolises the reality of caste discrimination in our society and with this broken foot, no one stands united as a society,” Kamble had once told me in an interview.

That was an act of irreverence. We were going to tell stories in our way. At Outlook, we would become a newsroom that would believe in collectives, in collaborations, in inclusivity, in integrity and in fearlessness. We stepped out of the weekly format because I felt we were not here to compete but to find our own way. We became thematic because a magazine must build its exclusivity in how it presents its stories in a time when the digital shift has made it difficult for print publications to survive.

We would create an equal newsroom. We would not be a place where men could harass women, where power structures like that would be dismantled and where no woman would have to find herself gagged like how we witnessed in the many cases that the #MeToo movement brought to the forefront. We would look at news from our perspective and do away with the male gaze that’s so pervasive everywhere else.

Outlook is all of that and more. And in the last three decades, we have done just that. We have been irreverent. And armed with poetry and art and literature, we will continue to tell the stories that matter, the stories that others overlook, the stories that need empathy and stories that aren’t sexist.

Each time they tore me apart, my friends and family would stitch me back into one piece. They would do this many times over. They never let me crack. It shouldn’t be this way. But we, the women, are battle-hardened.

So, here I am. And I am no puppet to men’s fisted strings.

Chinki Sinha is editor, outlook Magazine

This article appeared as To Men Who Write Women Off in Outlook’s January 01, 2026, issue '30 years of Irreverence' which commemorates the magazine's 30 years of journalism. From its earliest days of irreverence to its present-day transformation, the magazine has weathered controversy, crisis, and change.