Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

I have been to three book clubs this year.

Remarkable spaces. Warm rooms, sharp minds, generous tables. Women who had clearly read the book, dog-eared it, annotated it, and arrived ready to go to war — intellectually speaking — over its ideas.

I am on a book tour for – This Country Hates Our Men (Boys): Boy, You Are On Your Own.  A book, it should be noted, about men. Written *for* men. Urgently *needed* by men.

And yet.

I could count the men in the room on one hand. Sometimes one finger.

The ladies were gracious about it. They wanted more men there. They said so. They had invited their husbands, brothers, partners, and male friends. Some showed up once, nodded through the discomfort, and were never seen again.

They fizzled.

This is not a Cape Town problem. It is not a Johannesburg problem. It is a South African male problem. And it is, I want to argue, a fascinating one — because it is not what it looks like.


THE PARADOX

Here is what makes me suspicious of the simple answer.

South African men do not have a problem congregating. They do not have a problem showing up. They do not, despite popular wisdom, have a problem talking.

Go to any derby — Kaizer Chiefs versus Orlando Pirates. The stadium is not half-empty because men are allergic to group participation. Go to a braai. Go to a sports betting venue on a Saturday afternoon. Go to a sports bar during the Springboks. Men arrive early. Men stay late. Men are animated, expressive, and deeply emotionally invested. I have seen grown men weep over a Chiefs or Pirates or Sundown loss (mostly Chiefs)  – who would not cry at their own father’s funeral.

And then there is radio. YouTube. Podcasting. Vlogging.

Who dominates those spaces? Men. Men who will hold forth for three hours on subjects they know extraordinarily little about — with the full-body confidence of someone who wrote the dissertation. The Dunning-Kruger Effect in high definition. Men who will raise their blood pressure, risk their friendships, and practically go to war over a debate about a player’s fitness statistics or a political opinion formed entirely from a headline (“Malema’s 5 or 7 year direct imprisonment sentence”)     – they half-read.

These are not men who cannot talk.

These are not men who cannot feel.

These are men who have been handed a very specific map of where feeling and talking are permitted — and a book club is not on that map.



THE FEMINISATION PROBLEM — AND WHY IT IS MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT SOUNDS

Let us be honest about what book clubs signal to a significant portion of South African men.

They signal: “This is a woman’s space.”

The chairs are arranged in a circle. There is wine, or herbal tea, or something in a delicate glass. The conversation will involve words like ’emotional arc’ and “I felt like the author was trying to say” and “how did this make you feel?” Someone will cry. Someone will reference therapy. The vibe is permission-heavy, disclosure-friendly, and relational.

For men raised — as most South African men have been raised — inside a masculinity script that treats emotional disclosure as weakness, relational depth as femininity, and introspection as a form of self-indulgence, this room is not neutral. It is coded. And the code reads: “you do not belong here, or if you do, you are not quite man enough.”

But wait.

Because here is where it gets interesting.

Men do not avoid *all* spaces that require emotional investment, sustained attention, or collective sense-making. They avoid spaces where the emotional investment is *labelled*. Where the feelings are *the point*. Where the admission of not knowing — not having finished the book, not having understood the metaphor, not having a fully formed opinion — is *visible*.

Psychologists call this **alexithymia** — the difficulty in identifying and describing one’s own emotions. Research consistently shows it is more prevalent in men, and more socially reinforced. Men are not less emotional. They are less *emotionally literate* in the specific dialect that book clubs speak.

The masculinity researcher Michael Kimmel has argued for decades that manhood, unlike womanhood, is fundamentally *performative* — it must be constantly proved, never simply inhabited. A book club asks men to sit still, admit uncertainty, and discuss interiority. That is, in the masculinity performance script, triple jeopardy.

Add to this what we might call the **English Class Trauma** — the memory, vivid for many South African men, of being asked in school to explain what the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock *symbolised*, when the honest answer was “I have no idea and I did not read it” — and you begin to understand why the book club room triggers something closer to anxiety than snobbery.


BUT THE PODCASTERS, THOUGH

I want to return to this. Because it is the crack in the theory.

If men cannot open up, why are they dominant in every long-form talking medium? If men cannot discuss ideas emotionally, why do the most popular intellectual podcasts — sports, politics, philosophy, comedy, self-improvement — have male hosts and overwhelmingly male audiences?

The answer, I think, is **format and permission structure**.

The podcast is a monologue first, dialogue second. The YouTuber controls the camera and the edit. The radio caller chooses when to call, what to say, and when to hang up. These are *low-vulnerability, high-control* environments. The man does not have to admit he did not finish the book. He does not have to sit in a circle. He does not have to be asked, gently, *how did that make you feel?*

He can perform knowledge — even performed knowledge that is demonstrably wrong — without exposure.

The book club, by contrast, is live. It is social. And crucially, it is in a room with women who *have actually read the book* — which triggers the Dunning-Kruger awareness that, in this particular domain, the women are more competent. And that awareness, for men carrying the weight of a masculinity script that equates incompetence with unworthiness, is genuinely uncomfortable.

So they fizzle.

Not because they do not care. Because the cost of being seen not knowing, in a room where someone else clearly does, feels too high.

THE LITERATURE SAYS

The reading gap between men and women is well-documented and widening.

Research from the Pew Research Center shows women consistently outread men across nearly every country surveyed. In South Africa, where functional literacy remains unevenly distributed and where the association between school and punishment is culturally live for many men, the gap is compounded by class, language, and the legacy of an education system that used reading as a gatekeeping instrument rather than a liberation one.

Christina Hoff Sommers flagged the *boy crisis* in education long before it became mainstream conversation — boys falling behind in reading comprehension, disengaging from literary culture, being underserved by curricula that assumed the problem was access rather than relevance. Niobe Way’s research on male friendships found that boys begin with rich emotional vocabularies and deep relational capacity — and systematically unlearn it by mid-adolescence, coached out of it by peers, by fathers, by the culture.

By the time a South African man is thirty-five, standing at the door of a book club, he has spent two decades being trained away from exactly the skills the room requires.

The wonder is not that he fizzles. The wonder is that any of them come at all.



SO, WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO?

This is where I want to resist the temptation to give the usual listicle. *Change the venue! Read non-fiction! Have a braai!* These are not wrong. But they are downstream of the real intervention, which is cultural and cognitive.

The real shift is threefold.

First: Reframe what a book club is.

Not a feelings circle. An intellectual exchange. Not a therapy session. A combat sport — of ideas. Men will show up to argue. Build a room worth arguing in. The silent book club model — where participants read their own chosen book for an hour, then talk informally — removes the homework anxiety and the group-dictation problem simultaneously. It lowers the entry cost dramatically.

Second: Acknowledge the Dunning-Kruger dynamic openly.

The reason men posture so aggressively on podcasts and radio is that those formats reward confident ignorance. A good book club should do the opposite — reward honest uncertainty. Make *I don’t know* as admirable as *I have a theory.* Adam Grant calls this **calibration** — the discipline of checking your confidence against evidence. A book club is, at its best, a weekly calibration exercise. Market it that way.

Third: Build the room differently.

I attended a book club in Johannesburg held in a man’s garage. His *man cave*. Vinyl records on the wall. Bicycles hung as décor. Game consoles. Running trophies. The testosterone was architectural. And the conversation was extraordinary — because the room sent a signal before anyone spoke: *you are allowed to be here as you are.* That signal is everything.

My personal approach on the book tour has been direct: I walk into these female-dominated rooms and I say, clearly — *the men who most need to read this book are not in this room. And that is part of the argument the book is making.* It tends to land.


THE RECRUITMENT PROBLEM

If you are trying to build a mixed or male-leaning book club, the language of the invitation matters enormously.

Not: *Join us for a cosy evening discussing this month’s read.*

Try instead:


*Looking for more than small talk?*

We are building a space for people who actually want to think. One book a month — biographies, history, leadership, the kind of writing that makes you argue back. We meet at [venue]. Bring opinions. Leave the performance at the door.*

—

Or, if your audience is more casual:

—

*Books. Braais. Better conversations.*

We have enough sports talk. We are adding some substance. No mandatory feelings. No school English vibes. Just honest takes, sharp debate, and one book a month you might actually enjoy.*

—

The framing shifts from *come and be vulnerable* to *come and be challenged.* For men running the masculinity performance script, those are categorically different invitations.


THE REAL QUESTION

Here is what I keep sitting with, long after the book clubs end and the chairs go back against the wall.

The women in those rooms read my book and wept for the men in their lives. They understood it. They felt the weight of what boys carry and what men cannot say. They came ready to talk about it.

The men it was written for were not there.

That absence is not a scheduling problem. It is not a genre preference problem. It is a metacognition problem — a failure to think about one’s own thinking clearly enough to ask: *what am I actually avoiding, and what is it costing me?*

John Flavell, who coined the term in 1979, described metacognition as the ability to notice your thinking, question it, and change it on purpose. Brené Brown, on *The Curiosity Shop* with Adam Grant, argues it is the umbrella under which all self-awareness lives. Self-awareness. Anticipatory awareness. Situational awareness. All of it, rooted in the capacity to look at your own mind while it is working.

The men who fizzle from book clubs are not doing this. They are running an old script — *this is not for men like me* — without examining where that script came from, who wrote it, or what it is protecting them from.

What it is protecting them from, largely, is growth.

And in the meantime, the women keep meeting. Keep reading. Keep building the relational intelligence, the emotional vocabulary, the cognitive flexibility that the next decade will reward.

The men are at the braai.

The braai is great.

But the gap is widening.
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Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings  is the blog of Dr. Mzamo Masito — behavioural & business  scientist, author, and social entrepreneur.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.