This is not what gaslighting is.
“Gaslighting” is a word used to describe a specific pattern of abusive behavior. It’s abuse. That’s what it is. You cannot be “gaslit” in a single, one-off interaction with a person you don’t know and never see again, who poses absolutely zero immediate or long-term threat to your wellbeing. Gaslighting is when one person (an abuser) deliberately, systematically undermines a specific, deliberately-targeted victim’s memories, feelings, perceptions, and sense of self/identity, in order to psychologically destabilize them and make them more vulnerable to escalating abusive actions, often including (but not limited to) rape. It REQUIRES an ongoing relationship between abuser and victim, wherein the abuser repeatedly exercises significant power over the victim, including jeaporadizing their emotional, physical, and material wellbeing, in order to control and hurt them. You cannot “consent” to being gaslit; gaslighting is literally ENTIRELY ABOUT rendering a victim incapable of giving consent or setting boundaries. You cannot simply call a gaslighter a bitch and walk away while risking literally zero consequences to your immediate or long-term safety. If you can, IT ISN’T GASLIGHTING, it’s something else entirely.
What the people in these anecdotes did was rude, passive-aggressive, even a little manipulative — but it wasn’t gaslighting, any more than someone shoulder-checking you on the way into the subway is “rape”. It is vitally, vitally important to talk about the ways in which people can be mean or rude or even mildly bullying, without literally just stealing the words out of abuse survivors’ mouths and applying them to situations that have nothing to do with abuse or domestic violence.
Words like “gaslighting” are important to survivors of abuse because it is often hard to make people understand that our trauma is NOT caused by things like a stranger being kind of rude about our coats and that you CANNOT consent to gaslighting. No victim of gaslighting is a “willing participant”, any more than a victim of rape is a “willing participant” — in fact, gaslighting and rape often go hand-in-hand, because gaslighting, again, is abuse, not general rudeness.
If you want to talk about peer pressure, or passive-aggressive behavior, or classism and sexism in institutions like your MFA program, there are already words that exist for naming and talking about those things. Your point about countering petty manipulation with high self-esteem and a refusal to apologize is valid! But it does not actually apply to situations of ACTUAL gaslighting, which are nothing like the incidents you described, because those incidents were not gaslighting. Calling them such and then insisting that it is “easy” to “shut down” gaslighting by “calling out” the person doing it implies that it is “easy” to “shut down” abuse, and that victims who can’t are “letting” themselves be abused.
When you do this, you are contributing to a culture in which abuse is belittled, in which victims are told we were responsible for it because we could have stopped it if we really wanted, in which the most traumatic events of our lives become the punch lines of jokes. And you don’t even have to! You did it just so your article on medium would be a little more catchy, because “gaslighting” is less of a mouthful than “people making me feel a little bit insecure by being passive-aggressive before I’m rude and passive-aggressive back to them and then just walk away”. This is insulting, demeaning, and lazy. It’s also, as explained, just an inaccurate use of the word “gaslighting”.
Before you write more about gaslighting, I recommend reading some literature about what it ACTUALLY IS. Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? is a good starting place.
