Gender Roles In Goodfellas

If there is one overlapping theme that connects Gloria Steinem’s 1978 essay, “If Men Could Menstruate”, and Martin Scorsese’s 1990 film, Goodfellas, it is that society is a patriarchy where men and women are not looked at equally, as men are seen as the superior gender. Men were made to be the superior gender not by God or through Evolution, but by the cultural construction of society. Although there is no physical evidence pointing to men being better than women, males have somehow convinced females to play second-fiddle in the orchestra that is society. The film exposes the patriarchal structure of organized crime—“the family” as mafia members call it. Goodfellas indulges in and critiques this world by showing both the actions and the natures

of men and women.
The film portrays men as a very savage gender, focusing on the unnecessary amount of violence that is considered to be normal in the mafia. Scorsese directed the movie like this on purpose, glorifying this barbaric behavior in order to show how ridiculous it really is. Henry Hill explains the mob’s acceptance of killing while various images of lifeless men left beaten and bloodied flash across the screen:
“For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead. And they were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.”(Goodfellas)
When speaking about bad habits, some of the first things that come to mind are smoking cigarettes, biting one’s fingernails, or maybe watching too much television before bed. Here, Henry casually talks about some of his friends who happen to have habits where their anger gets the best of them and they kill people too often. Serial killing is as much of a pathological disease as it is a habit. The fact that the men in this film talk about death so carelessly sheds light on how brutish and inhumane the male sex is commonly perceived to be in society. The brash nature of these men seemed so natural that even their wives stopped noticing it."After awhile, it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crime. It was more like Henry was enterprising, and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while all the other guys were sitting on their asses, waiting for handouts.”(Goodfellas) Here, Karen justifies her husband’s criminal gang activity by describing money laundering, racketeering, and killing, as entrepreneurial business work as if it was done by a legitimate company. This film shows how members of both genders subconsciously accept the norms of society without even thinking how ridiculous the standard may be.
Society views men and women differently, mostly due to men making it seem like they were superior and women were inferior, when in reality they are not so different. After generations of men pounding the idea of penis-envy into the brains of society, even women have begun to believe that this ridiculous theory has truth behind it. For instance, in Goodfellas, the gangsters are very promiscuous with women—most of the men have wives as well as several mistresses. Henry Hill summarized the mob’s relationship with their women in a single line—“Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night was always for the girlfriends.” Some of the wives know about their husband’s friend’s mistresses, but don’t expose the men for their infidelities because the women fear that would lead to their own ostracization. The film shows how men have broken down the confidence of women for so long that women have started to fold behind the threatening idea of not being accepted in society, the same society that men have taken over with their biased beliefs that men are a dominant race.
While some women in the world prefer to carry themselves as strong independent women, many have unknowingly conformed to the gender rules of society and fallen into the ranks of the inferior gender as females.

For example, in Goodfellas, Henry Hill’s wife, Karen, caught him cheating on her with another woman. At first, she tries to take a dominant, and somewhat masculine, stance against her two-timing spouse. She decides to get aggressive and confront the mistress first before her husband. Karen goes to the girlfriend’s apartment and repeatedly buzzes over the intercom, saying “This is Karen Hill, I want to talk to you. Hello? Don't hang up on me. I want to talk to you. You keep away from my husband, you understand me? Hello? He's my husband. Get your own goddamn man.” Karen accosted the mistress first instead of her husband because it was the easier thing for her to do. She knew that it wasn’t the mistress’s fault that her husband was running around on her, but she was much less intimidated by another woman than by her mobster

husband.
Karen continues her aggressive and confrontational stance by waking Henry up while pointing a loaded gun in his face and interrogating him about his mistress.

She goes as far as to tell him that she’s gone crazy, as well as threatening to kill him. Karen responds, “Yea, I’m crazy enough to kill you.”(Goodfellas) when Henry asks her if she’s gone crazy. On the outside, she appears confident and strong, which isn’t too much of a challenge when possessing a weapon capable of ending someone’s life. But on the inside, she begins to break. Here, Karen’s inner voice takes over as the narrator. “...But still, I couldn’t hurt him. How could I hurt him, I couldn’t even bring myself to leave him. The truth was, no matter how bad I felt, I was still very attracted to him. Why should I give him to someone else? Why should she win?”(Goodfellas) The film suggests she made her decision to stay with Henry because she felt too dependent on him to live alone. This trend in women’s behavior is a result of years and years of men making them feel inferior. After Karen begins to choke up and lowering the barrel of the pistol, Henry quickly jumps at the opportunity to disarm his wife. He swiftly hits her in the head, knocking her down and taking her gun away, reducing her to a sobbing pile of rubble on the floor, much like a little girl who had just been scolded for the first time. Henry leapt at the first sign of weakness that she showed before taking control of the situation, which is a

metaphor for men historically overpowering and dominating women as soon as they give men the opportunity to do so. This theory connects perfectly with the conclusion of Gloria Steinem’s essay, “. . . In fact, if men could menstruate, the power justifications could probably go on forever. If we let them.”(Steineim 255). In this powerful excerpt, Steinem declares that men only have as much power over women as women give them, and men will always have more power than women unless women take control of the situation, referring to the gender divide in today’s society.
In Gloria Steinem’s essay, “If Men Could Mensturate”, she repeatedly touches on the idea that men have taught women to accept the role of inferiority over time. Here, she uses satire in her writing in order to show how ridiculous men sound when they are trying to convince women of something. “Men would convince women that intercourse was more pleasurable at ‘that time of the month.’….Of course, male intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguments….And how would women be trained to react? One can imagine traditional women agreeing to all these arguments with a staunch and smiling masochism.”(255). While this quote may appear to be a few lines randomly thrown together, it actually represents the big picture in Steinem’s greater argument. She gives several small examples of men acting blindly in arrogance, where their beliefs of male superiority obviously prevail through their words and actions. However, she carefully turns the lens and spotlight of the essay onto the women’s perspective, wondering how they would act, or more importantly, how they would be trained to act. This line is the climax in “If Men Could Menstruate” as it makes the point of her argument very clear; women are a superior race only because men have taught them to be.