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The show highlights how male privilege and toxicity can poison a woman, eventually snapping her in two.
In the most recent episode of men having the audacity to make everything about themselves and turn sensitive matters into ‘jokes’, our guest of dishonour is none other than influencer Azlan Shah!
Digital creator by trade, husband to another influencer with-a-larger-following-than-himself by relationship status, father to a toddler, and a self-proclaimed victim to — wait for it — postpartum.
You don’t see the problem yet? Let me break it down.
For those who may be unaware, postpartum refers to the period after childbirth that a mother goes through, as her body tries to recover from the massive trauma it underwent during pregnancy, delivery and beyond.
Etymologically, the word ‘postpartum’ comes from Latin, with “post” meaning “after” and “partum” meaning “birth”.
So no, Azlan, it cannot be taken as a philosophical birth; it specifically means the literal, physical act of giving birth.
I can go into the details of what exactly the process of giving birth entails, from which recovery is needed during the postpartum period. However, as important a topic as that is, it will likely make a lot of the people (read: men) reading this squirm in their seats.
And as much as I enjoy seeing the privileged feel uncomfortable at the mere mention of facts about the bodies and experiences of those different from them (which are things that should have been common knowledge by now anyway), I also need to be mindful of the restrictions posed by word limits and dwindling attention spans.
So, for now, let’s just briefly recap the few major components of this process for the education for all the Azlan Shahs out there.
The uterus typically weighs 55 to 60 grammes pre-pregnancy, and by the time of delivery, it multiplies in size to nearly a whole kilogramme. That is between 14 to 20 times its original size.
During postpartum, it shrinks to return to its pre-pregnancy size and condition. This involves physical cramps (also known as “afterpains”), especially while breastfeeding.
Speaking of the uterus, its contractions are painful, yet important even post-delivery to prevent bleeding from becoming heavy enough that it escalates into postpartum haemorrhage.
Then come the hormonal shifts.
Delivery causes the body to undergo some of the rapidest hormonal drops in human biology. When pregnant, oestrogen rises to anywhere between 100 to 1,000 times the usual level, and progesterone rises by up to 30 times. After childbirth, both of these plummet sharply within just hours — with this rapid crash usually leading to emotional sensitivity, night sweats, temperature changes, depression, anxiety, vaginal dryness, and the all too common ‘baby blues’ experienced by an estimated 85 per cent of all mothers.
On the other hand, cortisol rises during pregnancy and usually declines after birth, though it may stay elevated in some women with chronic stress, nutrient deprivation or sleep disruption. Prolactin and oxytocin surge around delivery and during breastfeeding, supporting milk production, bonding, and uterine recovery.
These hormonal shifts, combined with the demands of newborn care (which disproportionately fall on the already exhausted mother’s shoulders, especially in Pakistan), create a complex mix of symptoms, such as fluctuating stress levels, fatigue, sleep changes, libido shifts, and altered affection. This is in addition to the largely-overlooked, unstable thyroid hormone that can cause postpartum thyroiditis and other complications.
All these hormones increase, decrease, and/or fluctuate naturally during and after childbirth, and some are further affected by lactation and environmental factors.
Imagine the uncertainty. The unprecedented pace of constant (and largely uncontrollable) change that the mother’s body goes through. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. We haven’t even touched upon labour pain, vaginal tearing/C-section surgery, mastitis, pelvic floor damage, or the multifaceted psychosocial stressors that are especially exacerbated in cultures such as ours — making a woman’s postpartum life harder than it already happens to be. Mind you, all of this is about the ‘normal’ postpartum period, which every single biological mother goes through. Meanwhile, the everliving ghost of postpartum depression continues to lurk as another possible form of struggle linked to motherhood, and a very common one at that.
Twenty-eight to 63pc of mothers experience postpartum depression in Pakistan.
“But what does Azlan Shah have to do with this?” Nothing, and yet, unfortunately, everything.
Last week, Shah made the absurd choice to put up a since-deleted carousel post on Instagram captioned, “Let’s talk about postpartum… for dads.”
Really? Did you give birth to the child?
“The Dad Version of Postpartum, the part no one talks about,” read the first slide, featuring a picture of him with his wife, Warisha Javed, who is holding their baby in her arms.
The 10-slide post moved through more such pictures of either the three of them together or of him alone with the baby, while one showed Javed alone on a hospital bed.
Many men don’t often post their partners and children online very much, so the opposite happening here could’ve been considered a small sign of healthy masculinity. However, Shah had other plans.
Instead, he chose to add accompanying text with each picture that sought to illustrate how supposedly difficult men have it when it comes to dealing with — yes, you guessed it right — postpartum.
What made it worse was how the post seemingly equated the very unique and stark physiological changes a mother goes through during pregnancy and postpartum, with the real yet nowhere near comparable emotional changes a father may experience during the same period.
If he really wanted to shed light on a father’s struggles with respect to new parenthood, he could’ve easily done so without misusing a term that doesn’t apply to him. The right term for that would be perinatal/paternal postnatal depression. The fact that he chose to instead hijack an issue that even mothers don’t get a fraction of support for screams attention-seeking laced with fragile masculinity and misogyny. “Because healing and support aren’t just for moms,” the post concluded by saying.
Theoretically speaking, this is absolutely true. However, we live in a country where countless mothers are expected to go back to looking like their pre-pregnancy selves within weeks and be responsible for all childcare and general domestic labour, even after going through nine months of life-altering bodily changes. Conversely, it is quite socially acceptable for fathers to not share the labour of changing diapers and taking care of the baby’s (or his partner’s) other needs, and still receive praise and support for the minuscule effort of participating in conceiving the child and (sometimes) looking after the financial needs of the family.
In this environment, does it not feel like a slap in the faces of mothers to first go through all that they do, not get enough community support to deal with it, and then be robbed of the one word that is meant to give their distinctly difficult early experiences a name?
It feels like an exercise in futility and needless frustration to quote every single sentence from Shah’s post and explain why it doesn’t make any sense, so I will not do that. Instead, what I will do is ask the men reading this: why do you feel the need to hijack issues that have nothing to do with you?
Why do you feel threatened when women take the initiative to publicly talk about problems that they are either solely or disproportionately affected by, especially to the extent that you end up centring yourself in that discourse?
I am all for men being vulnerable and seeking support, but it cannot happen at the cost of trivialising the horrors that women often have to go through in those situations.
In a society where men already feel like they are doing their wives — and, perhaps, women in general — a favor by so much as pouring themselves a glass of water every once in a while or by ‘babysitting’ their kids to ‘help’ their wives singlehandedly take on what should be the partnered job of parenting, social media posts like Shah’s further recede the bar of expectations women are socioculturally allowed to hold from men.
Proof of this lies in a comment made by his wife on the same post, glorifying her husband’s half-baked take.
Then there are the accusations that Shah copied the entire post without giving the original creator credit, which if true, meant that he took both a word that does not belong to him but also someone else’s ideas and intellectual (no matter how half baked) effort. At this point, the bar is truly 350 feet underground.
The thing about gender roles and social conditioning in a patriarchal environment such as ours is that when a woman is shamed for doing something supposedly wrong, she more often than not has enough humility to apologise.
She apologises even when she shouldn’t — which applies frequently, because women are often shamed just for existing rather than doing something ethically wrong.
On the other hand, men often not only commonly lack this humility but also possess the uniquely unwanted and perverse talent of doubling down on their problematic behaviours.
This point of sociological analysis bears relevance here because Azlan Shah is proving to be a living example of it.
Mere days after being rightly shamed into taking down the postpartum post from Instagram (while still keeping it up on Facebook) and being criticised elsewhere online for posting it in the first place, we already have something new to be mad at him for.
Taking to his Instagram stories recently, he shared an “important” announcement: “I am getting married again”.
A desperate “My wife has consented to it” followed this explosive statement. Perhaps the desperation lay in the entire story itself. Desperate for attention, for views, for clicks, clout and celebrity page speculation.
With social media being an integral enough part of so many people’s lives that there’s the “attention economy” exists, I get why content creators want attention, views, clicks and clout. These things fuel their lifestyles, and trying to earn money to live comfortably is as basic a desire as it gets, which isn’t a problem. The problem arises when their content becomes problematic, and Shah’s content has become problematic.
It is content aligned with patriarchal notions, wrapped in a layer of feminist concepts like consent and men’s mental health in order to avert backlash over what he’s saying.
I could go deeper into this analysis, but here comes another plot twist: Shah isn’t actually engaging in polygamy, at least not filhaal. He announced along with his wife through a video posted two days ago that his story on this topic was referring to getting “remarried” to his first and only wife, on account of their third wedding anniversary coming up.
Oh wow! A joke so good, I can totally see a career for him in stand-up comedy — because all the people of decent mental capacity would surely stand up and walk out of the room upon hearing such tasteless humour!
It is nearly the end of 2025 — when will men start learning that patriarchal pranks are not funny? Announcing that you are getting remarried, with or without your wife’s consent, is not a new sport for Pakistani men, and for Shah to chase clout by treating such a serious issue as a frivolous prank makes one question the standard we’ve set for men across the board, because if Shah, as a man who claims to love his wife, is resorting to such misogynistic and lazy self-promotion tactics, how abysmal must the state of other not-so-nice men be?
It is a question that men like Shah, and those worse than him (which exist aplenty), must reflect on if they want to keep the hope of ending up with a woman alive. Because, as I type this, Pakistani women are posting comments calling out Shah for his insufferability — with some jokingly hypothesising this being a consequence of his ‘postpartum’.
Amidst this entire fiasco, one positive thing has emerged — we are finally seeing women in greater numbers having the political consciousness required to recognise such inexcusable attention-seeking endeavours for what they really are, which is in large part thanks to the thankless labour of feminist movements worldwide, especially those in Pakistan.
While it remains to be seen whether the reaction to his post and ‘joke’ will stop him from posting anymore embarrassing takes for the foreseeable future, what matters more is that many women are seeing through the performance — and they’re done applauding.