Social justice warriors love to either take an existing word with a negative connotation (such as "racism"), or invent completely new made-up words (such as "mansplaining"), and then just change their original meaning to serve their narrative, and use them as generic insults and accusations with little to no meaning, diluting them into meaning essentially nothing.
I have previously written how they did this to the word "mansplaining". Here I'll deal with the word "gaslighting".
In principle, "gaslighting" is a kind of psychological trick where one person convinces another person to doubt their own memory or experience about something. The first person plants the seeds of doubt into the second person's mind, to make them doubt their memory on something. Did it really happen like you remember? Are you absolutely sure you remember it correctly? Other people did not witness the event in the same way as you. Perhaps you are just confused? All this evidence is pointing out that you are misremembering; it didn't happen as you think. It's normal to have incorrect memories about an event, especially when you were stressed or panicking... It happens all the time. When for example the police interview eyewitnesses to a crime, they get as many different accounts as there are eyewitnesses... Everybody tells the story a bit differently, sometimes wildly differently...
You see how this works. Given enough psychological manipulation it's easy to make a person doubt the accuracy of their own memory on something, especially if this person is susceptible to such manipulation.
Originally feminist social justice warrior academics started using this word to claim that victims of rape may be manipulated in this manner by the "patriarchy", authorities, people in charge, people trying to defend the culprit, to make the victim recant and retract her accusations.
Like with so many other such examples, there might have been at least a modicum of validity to this claim (although its commonality and frequency was probably way exaggerated), but then feminists just loved the term and started using and abusing it with little regard to what the word actually means.
It is, in fact, abused in two different ways:
Firstly, it's used by feminists to tell other feminists to stop listening to criticism. "He's just gaslighting you" is used to essentially say "stop listening to him, ignore what he's saying, don't think about anything he says". It's essentially the same kind of tactic used by religious cults to stop cult members from listening to and thinking about criticism, to isolate themselves from differing ideas.
Secondly, and as usual, the meaning of the word has been completely diluted to the point that it means absolutely nothing. They just love to use the word, because it sounds fancy and academic, and don't care one iota what the word originally meant. Nowadays it means pretty much "anything I don't like". Not just criticism and differing ideas, but pretty much anything that somebody says to them that they don't like is now "gaslighting". The original meaning of "making someone doubt their own memory" is usually nowhere to be seen.
I have previously written how they did this to the word "mansplaining". Here I'll deal with the word "gaslighting".
In principle, "gaslighting" is a kind of psychological trick where one person convinces another person to doubt their own memory or experience about something. The first person plants the seeds of doubt into the second person's mind, to make them doubt their memory on something. Did it really happen like you remember? Are you absolutely sure you remember it correctly? Other people did not witness the event in the same way as you. Perhaps you are just confused? All this evidence is pointing out that you are misremembering; it didn't happen as you think. It's normal to have incorrect memories about an event, especially when you were stressed or panicking... It happens all the time. When for example the police interview eyewitnesses to a crime, they get as many different accounts as there are eyewitnesses... Everybody tells the story a bit differently, sometimes wildly differently...
You see how this works. Given enough psychological manipulation it's easy to make a person doubt the accuracy of their own memory on something, especially if this person is susceptible to such manipulation.
Originally feminist social justice warrior academics started using this word to claim that victims of rape may be manipulated in this manner by the "patriarchy", authorities, people in charge, people trying to defend the culprit, to make the victim recant and retract her accusations.
Like with so many other such examples, there might have been at least a modicum of validity to this claim (although its commonality and frequency was probably way exaggerated), but then feminists just loved the term and started using and abusing it with little regard to what the word actually means.
It is, in fact, abused in two different ways:
Firstly, it's used by feminists to tell other feminists to stop listening to criticism. "He's just gaslighting you" is used to essentially say "stop listening to him, ignore what he's saying, don't think about anything he says". It's essentially the same kind of tactic used by religious cults to stop cult members from listening to and thinking about criticism, to isolate themselves from differing ideas.
Secondly, and as usual, the meaning of the word has been completely diluted to the point that it means absolutely nothing. They just love to use the word, because it sounds fancy and academic, and don't care one iota what the word originally meant. Nowadays it means pretty much "anything I don't like". Not just criticism and differing ideas, but pretty much anything that somebody says to them that they don't like is now "gaslighting". The original meaning of "making someone doubt their own memory" is usually nowhere to be seen.
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