In 2016, the American Dialect Society (ADS) recognized the word "gaslight" as the "Most Useful" new word of the year. Sure, the word had become near-ubiquitous by then, but that just made it widespread. Why did so many people find it so useful?
Probably because gaslighting described something a lot of people wanted to talk about but there was no other word that quite captured its essence, which I’ll define as a way of casting doubt on another person’s grasp of reality. To gaslight someone is to say or imply they’re imagining things that don’t exist.
Although the word ‘gaslight’ has been around for decades, it didn’t gain much traction until the #MeToo movement, which in part was about women being heard, respected, and believed as they spoke truth to power, especially male power. Of course, earlier generations of women also fought to be taken seriously. But it was slow going - unsurprisingly so, given long-standing cultural attitudes that dismissed women as too emotional, suggestible, and small-minded to be astute observers of other people and the greater world, much less deep thinkers about matters beyond the domestic sphere. In other words, women had been essentialized as a certain type of person and as such could safely be ignored much of the time.
These days, I suspect the motivation to gaslight often precedes the essentializing, as when we label a person to make it easier to dismiss what they has to say. Oh, they’re just a garden-variety progressive or a right-wing nut. Progressives seem especially prone to gaslighting through labeling people and their opinions, e.g., racists, dog whistle, etc. I may be wrong, but a quick Google search revealed lots of articles and posts complaining about the gaslighting left, for instance:
Not that the left are total slackers in the accusation-of-gaslighting department:
Hopefully one day we can all get pass the gaslighting and accusations of gaslighting and start talking to each other again.