The sexist roots of political gaslighting, and how to combat it
With the increasing prevalence of psychological concepts in our everyday language, “gaslighting” has emerged as a powerful tool to describe manipulation. And it is not just limited to interpersonal relationships: in our age of post-truth and rampant misinformation, entire societies could be gaslit. Green European Journal explores how can we defend ourselves from the truth-bending rhetoric of narcissistic leaders.
According to American psychoanalyst Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide (2023), “gaslighting is a powerful, insidious, often covert form of psychological manipulation, repeated over time, that erodes a person’s trust in their own perception of reality, judgement and in extreme cases, their own sanity. It’s not an individual pathology – it thrives in the emotional soil of unequal relationships.”
“While gaslighting can occur across all gender identities,” continues Stern, “it disproportionately affects women, but not because women are inherently more vulnerable. Women are historically socialized and taught to ‘be nice’ and to please, but because patriarchy has long sanctioned male authority and discredited female perception.”
In recent years, gaslighting has also become a political category, reflecting a broader trend of using psychological concepts to explain the collective phenomena and dynamics of our society.
The now-famous term originated in the British play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, first staged in London in 1938.In 1944, it got a movie adaptation directed by George Cukor, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. The film tells the story of a marriage in which the husband manipulates his wife by lying to her and changing small elements in the house – dimming the lights in the gas lamps, for instance – to the point that she begins to doubt her own perception and mental health.
Gaslighting consists of a reversal of responsibility: those who engage in it do not deny the truth of an issue, but shift the problem onto the other person, attacking them for their way of being.
In this context, gaslighting has emerged as “a word that gives voice to the discomfort of being told your pain isn’t real – whether by a partner or by a government. As with many social institutions, this vocabulary can travel at first in the form of whispers, but in the end it speaks with authority.”
Manipulation based on denial, division, active denigration, as well as disturbing or chaotic behaviour are some of the most common manifestations of political narcissism.
“Political gaslighting is the collective cousin of intimate betrayal”, Stern says. “While interpersonal gaslighting distorts one individual’s sense of self and truth, political gaslighting seeks to distort or rewrite a population’s shared reality. It’s not just a tactic – it’s a strategy of control. The psychological mechanism is the same: deny, deflect, distort. But the reach is far broader, and the consequences more sweeping”.
If political propaganda seeks to persuade the public, gaslighting seeks to disorient.
When political leaders or institutions downplay atrocities, deny facts that have been clearly documented, or accuse dissidents of being “deranged”, they are not just engaging in propaganda, they are waging a war on perception, Stern argues. “The goal is destabilisation, not persuasion.” If political propaganda seeks to persuade the public, gaslighting seeks to disorient.
Gaslighting is closely related to another concept that has become popular in recent years: post-truth. Researcher Natascha Rietdijk links the two phenomena by noting that they each undermine both our confidence in ourselves as subjects of knowledge, as well as our epistemic autonomy (i.e. the belief that we are good judges of the trustworthiness of others).
Like gaslighting, post-truth downgrades truth to a matter of secondary importance, while appeals to emotions and personal beliefs become more relevant than the facts themselves.
So how should one respond? Gaslighting works when the victim does not recognise it as such, Rietdijkk explains. While rebelling against gaslighting in the private sphere entails the risk of isolation, “the benefit of the political domain is that isolation is harder to achieve, and there is possibility for collective resistance and solidarity.”
Frappat suggests irony as a weapon to turn gaslighting against those who seek to manipulate. At the end of Cukor’s film, the protagonist ironically rebels against her husband-oppressor – “if I were not mad I could have helped you” – finding joy in the same language that had been used against her. It is a dynamic similar to the re-appropriation of the word “queer” by the LGBTQIA+ community, which has turned insult into affirmation.
Frappat calls for an irony that is “rebellious, wild, lively and sexy”, because laughter “suspends belief in all these fairy tales that have perpetuated, for millennia, the inequality of women”. And of societies as a whole.
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