It was towards the end of 2017, nearly a year before #MeToo became an enormous movement that swept through the metros of India—as rapidly as it had spread in the West—that Delhi-based writer Prachi Gangwani had an epiphany of sorts. As a writer for a women’s lifestyle magazine, where she covered the relationships and sex section, she was continuously interacting with women to get their thoughts on a variety of issues. “I realised that women from different cities, professions, and even at different stages in their relationships, had some common themes when it came to their struggles with the men in their lives,” she says. Because Gangwani has a background in psychology—she is a former practising family and couples counsellor—it was hard for her to not notice the patterns. She decided to interact with a cross section of men, only to realise that “men were not even thinking about the issues” that were driving most women up the wall. It’s then that she began contemplating penning a “dating guide for men”.

“I had even started writing that book,” she recalls. Then #MeToo happened, and that drastically changed the tone of Gangwani’s work, and the quality of conversations she was having with her subjects. “Issues like gender roles, and consent weren’t really discussed before that. It brought it all to the mainstream. We now had a shared vocabulary, and men were more open to talk about it.”