t is increasingly common to see a video on Instagram where a man, probably in his mid-twenties, sits in his kitchen filming himself cook. He narrates the process in a soft voice, makes a comment about his mother’s recipe, maybe reads a couplet by Faiz before the onions go in.

The comments say things like “bhai tumharay andar aik aurat hai” (dude, you have a woman inside you).

Many mean it as an insult. He replies with a heart emoji. The video gets three hundred thousand views.

Something is shifting in how Pakistani men are performing online. It is worth asking whether that shift goes any deeper than the performance.

The phrase “soft masculinity” has arrived from K-pop discourse and global gender conversations. However, the instinct it describes is not foreign to this soil. Mir Taqi Mir wept openly in his verses. Bulleh Shah dressed as a woman to reach his spiritual teacher and thought nothing of it. The Mughal courts produced men who composed music, debated poetry at mushairas (poetic symposiums) and considered emotional literacy a marker of refinement. Colonial rule did a specific kind of damage here in that the British military administration had little use for sensitive men. The archetype it rewarded was stoic and hierarchical. That model stuck around long after the British left. We have been calling it mardangi (or hard masculinity) ever since.

Then modern arts and entertainment enter the chat. Coke Studio kept interrupting that archetype as best as it could. When Rahat Fateh Ali Khan or Abida Parveen appeared on screen, they demonstrated men and women who treated anguish as a legitimate public language. The audience wept and nobody called it unmanly. More recently, younger male artists on the platform have leaned further into vulnerability. The numbers suggest an audience hungry for exactly that.

On Instagram and TikTok, you find Pakistani men reading Ahmed Faraz aloud, uploading cooking reels, crying after breakups on camera. In India, a parallel wave has produced figures like content creators who read Gulzar and Javed Akhtar, the “gentle men” aesthetic, male poets performing at open mics about their mothers and their loneliness.

Across the border, the cultural content is different but the emotional grammar is the same where men announce that they have interior lives, and that this is acceptable.

Oscar Wilde said that the first duty in life was to assume a pose. He was being witty, but he was also describing exactly what happens when emotional vulnerability becomes content. 

But, is it? Here is where things get complicated.

The audience for this in Pakistan is real, but it is also quite esoteric. The men doing this publicly are mostly city-based, educated at English-medium schools, from families where a certain kind of self-expression was already tolerated. Their followers are people from those same circles. Scroll to the comments on these videos from accounts outside that bubble and the response is frequent mockery and occasional disgust. The boy who works as a mechanic in Lyari and the labourer who comes home to a joint family system in Mozang are not represented in these videos. The soft masculinity conversation has not really reached them except as something to laugh at. What looks like a cultural shift is, for now, a conversation among a particular class talking to itself.

There is also the question of what is actually changing versus what is being aestheticised, for the lack of a better word: a man who reads Faiz on camera but will not discuss his mental health with his father; a man whose Instagram is full of cooking content but who has never actually cooked for his wife; a man who cries at a concert but will not let his son choose a career in dancing. The aesthetic of softness and the actual redistribution of emotional labour inside homes and relationships are very different things.

Therapy culture in Pakistan is rising, but mostly among people who can afford Rs 5,000 an hour, which to some people is a week’s grocery bill. To be brutally honest, average Pakistani household still runs on the logic that men provide and women feel.

There is also something worth noticing about how this softness is performed. It is frequently very curated. Good lighting, bookshelf visible, poetry more for popularity like Faiz, not a random couplet in Punjabi or Sindhi or Pushto, the so-called regional languages. Even the grief is photogenic with the right filters and background music.

Oscar Wilde said that the first duty in life was to assume a pose. He was being witty, but he was also describing exactly what happens when emotional vulnerability becomes content. It is then that you have to ask whether the feeling is real or whether it has been produced for the algorithm.

And yet, to dismiss all of it as ‘performance’ would be uncharitable. Something is genuinely moving. Boys in Pakistan are growing up watching other men express emotions without the world ending. That normalisation matters even if the messenger is using it as tokenism. The Sufis understood this, Rumi wrote about it and Nusrat sang about it. If a man learns that it is acceptable to cry because a video told him so, the lesson is still learnt.

The next step, though, is to make sure that lesson travels beyond the MacBook screen and into actual relationships, actual conversations and the actual daily negotiations. Softness as aesthetic is a start; softness as practice is the goal.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer