I've encountered several uses of the word “gaslighting” in the media recently. It’s become a journalist’s cliche`, but I couldn't quite grasp the way it was being used, so I went to the source, the 1944 film Gaslight , directed by George Cukor with Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten in the leading roles. (There’ve been other re-makes, but Cukor’s remains the most referenced.)

The story defines misogyny. But our journalists don’t use the word “gaslighting” in that sense, but in a more general sense of manipulating a person’s thinking to undermine their values. But Gaslight’s primary theme focuses on a male dominating a female until she believes she is crazy. She makes herself vulnerable to him and he sees that opening and makes her his slave. He destroys her independent sense of self.

Were the character played by a black actress, the idea would be clear: she is a slave. The female lead–Bergman–is driven into a trembling shell of herself until she is saved by a man–the Cotton character, a detective. It is fair, then to infer that George Cukor’s essential driving idea behind the film–and the play that proceeded it in 1940–is that the female is the weaker, easily dominated human being, who is saved from herself only by the intervention of a good man.

BUT, if one goes back to look at reviews of Gaslight, those deep cultural themes don’t get picked up by reviewers! They talk about everything else, but it is as if reviewers of Gaslight then and now are blind to the cultural depth of the misogyny in that story. If I’m right about that blindness in professional reviewers then and now, then the depth of our cultural expectations about male/female domination and submission has only been scratched on its surface.

Thus when people think of misogyny as hate––which Webster’s dictionary does–– they miss the deeper point. Misogyny is more about contempt or disdain and leads to slave-making, domineering, controlling and has been with us at least since the classic Greeks. Or even before that given the spread of Indo-European warrior tribes and the patriarchal successes in the middle east. I was first brought to this kind of thinking by Marija Gimbutas’ book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe back in the 70s. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-06-11-tm-2975-story.html.

She was an archeologist. Her book was much dismissed at first. One shouldn’t be surprised because she describes cultures that were not male-dominated, if anything, the genders collaborated. By the way, what is the animal most despised in the Patriarchal cultures? Pigs, statues of which Gimbutas found all over the remains of cultures she studied, cultures that later came to be dominated by the patriarchs who made pigs the symbol of bad. And they still are.