Man Up, Boys
Women have been doing it for generations

ELIZABETH GEORGE
Feb 13, 2026

Warning: You may be offended by some of the things I have to say in this essay. I will always be as honest as I can with readers. So if terms relating to men, power, and sexual matters bother you, perhaps you shouldn’t read this one.

When I was teaching high school English eons ago, my favorite subject was Shakespeare. I’d loved Shakespeare from the first page of The Merchant of Venice, the play that was my introduction to his works when I was in 9th grade. We had only the footnotes in our Folger’s editions of the play to enhance our understanding of what was actually being said and what was actually going on. Using these footnotes, which appeared on a page opposite the page of dialogue, the student could write a full “translation” of the text or a little summary in the margins (in pencil, suitable for erasing so that Sister Laurinda wouldn’t have a coronary should she catch someone in the act). Each year, then, we read one of Shakespeare’s plays, working our way—if I remember correctly—from The Merchant of Venice to Julius Caesar to Macbeth to Hamlet.

Although I’d created a Shakespeare class as a student teacher, in my first job at El Toro High School in California in the 1970s, there was already a Shakespeare class. I longed to have it offered to me. But I had to wait for the woman who was teaching it to leave before I was given the opportunity.

I chose as my curriculum the sonnets, as well as The Tempest, Richard III, and Macbeth. Although I loved Richard III, Macbeth was actually my favorite play to teach. I loved it because of its exploration of marriage, manipulation, and manhood.

Macbeth is one of the tragedies. (Shakespeare wrote comedies, histories, and tragedies). As a student, I had been taught that, in a tragedy, the hero always has a fatal flaw. I was also taught that Macbeth’s fatal flaw was his ambition and, had he not been ambitious, he would not have murdered King Duncan, the act that puts him onto the slippery slope to his eventual perdition. After all, Macbeth himself says that he “hath no spur to prick the sides of [his] intent” except “vaulting ambition,” painting ambition as a rider trying to vault onto a horse but vaulting too high and slipping off the other side of the animal. However, as far as I can at this moment recall, that’s the only time he mentions ambition in the play. How then can ambition be his fatal flaw?

A more thorough consideration of the play reveals that Macbeth often acts at the behest and with the encouragement of his wife. Indeed, she’s able to pull his strings quite easily, but not by mentioning ambition. Indeed, she does it by mentioning his manhood when he doesn’t behave as she would have him do. “Then you were a man,” she says to him in reference to his promise that he will kill Duncan, which he admits he has reservations about doing. “What? Quite unmanned in folly?” she says in mockery when he believes he’s seeing Banquo’s ghost wandering around his dining table after Macbeth has had him murdered. She knows exactly how to push his buttons because unlike others who might have considered going into battle and successfully slaying enemies as “being a real man”, what Lady Macbeth knows is that being able to kill people is not how her husband defines manhood. She knows that he has defined it in the one way that he has so far failed to be a man: he has not been able to impregnate her. And he knows that this is his problem, not hers, for as she is only too happy to tell him “I have given suck” and she declares that she knows “how tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.” She is able to skewer her husband successfully because she is aware of a weakness he will neither admit to himself nor admit to others. “Then you would be so much more the man,” she tells him.

When he at last realizes the true enormity of what he’s done in killing an anointed king, he also realizes that he will never have a son to whom he can pass his ill-gotten crown, so what really was the point, after all? Indeed, based upon what the three witches have told him, he’s done this deed to make “the sons of Banquo kings.” It was all for nothing. Rather than facing who he is and what he has done, he becomes more bloody, more cruel, striking out at his perceived enemies and his actual enemies, going to the extreme of murdering the wife and children of his nemesis Macduff. Macduff’s griefstricken words “He has no children” remind us that this act is something that Macduff cannot avenge. There is no one in Macbeth’s life whose death can affect him as profoundly as have, to Macduff, the deaths of his entire family.

I believe that manhood is one of the issues we’re looking at as a nation just now. Manhood and lack of manhood. “Man up” is an imperative thrown about casually in reference to someone (to use Macbeth the play one last time) becoming willing “to screw [his] courage to the sticking place.” And what we are asking Congress to do is to “man up” and deal with everything going on that is serving to cover up the hideous crimes committed upon the bodies of children, teenagers, and young women, all with the insidious encouragement of that architect of abuse and predation, Jeffrey Epstein. We’re asking Congress to do what Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice will not do: to reveal the criminals, some of whom sit right there in Congress; we’re asking for an accounting; we’re asking for the predators to pay the price for callously ruining lives.

What I find compelling about what is going on in the country right now is the fact that the men and women who have stepped forward and identified themselves—the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his merry band of loathsome pedophiles—have more courage and have consequently “manned up” in ways the majority of the current members of Congress apparently cannot bring themselves to do. I find this pathetic. I’ve grown quite accustomed to Donald Trump’s style of manning up: pointing fingers, lying, name-calling, ridiculing, humiliating others, accepting bribes, denying, denying, denying, denying. But the fact that Senators and Congressmen in the majority are apparently incapable of manning up, the fact that they have learned to assume the psychological fetal position when it comes to dealing with the unspeakable things done for the sake of—really? can you actually believe it?—some male having an orgasm at the cost of a child’s innocence and future is beyond my ability to comprehend. But of course, the unspeakable acts committed against the young victims really have little to do with sexual gratification, do they? They are about asserting power over the powerless, and the only sort of man who does this to a child or other helpless individual is one who doubts his masculinity, one whose limited knowledge of himself gives him permission to do unspeakable things simply because he can.
Let me ask you this, can you see a band of women acting in this way? Can you visualize a billionaire woman acquiring a pimp (our male version of Ghislaine Maxwell) to talk little boys into giving this same billionaire woman—and all of her friends, of course—very, very special massages? Can you imagine a woman flying her pals to her personal island where anything goes and nothing matters save drinking, carousing, and using the defenseless for sexual pleasure?

You can’t, can you. You can’t because it wouldn’t happen. While there have been evil women in this country (Ghislaine topping the list), there has never been anything on this scale developed and orchestrated by a billionaire woman for scores of other women.

Do I think all men are like these companions of Epstein? I hope I have made it clear that I don’t. But there are men in the world—and many in our country—who are exactly like Jeffrey Epstein, and it’s more than time that they paid the price.

Let’s look at the truth of the matter: Pam Bondi isn’t about to do the job for which she was hired by Donald Trump. If she won’t, someone needs to man up and do it for her.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104