New Delhi, Feb. 22 -- When I stumbled upon the Agents of Ishq website back in 2016, I was confused at first. Was this brightly illustrated, pop-culture-infused platform, liberally sprinkled with Hindi words, music and poetry, an attempt at taking sex education out of the realm of stuffy classrooms and anatomical diagrams? Was it a how-to guide about romance and pleasure? A repository of erotic stories? Personal essays about love and desire? Perhaps because there was nothing quite like it on the internet anywhere, it took me a while to realise it was all this and more.

In my mind, that was a happier, more innocent time-before online misogyny and the manosphere had made relationships so fraught; before we had learned to label feelings so a...