I watched it for the first time last week.īergman plays a woman, Paula, whose husband, Gregory, slowly convinces her that she's imagining things. Gaslight is a 1944 movie (originally a play) starring Ingrid Bergman. I was referring to how, for many of the things that happened to me, like that day by the Connecticut River more than a decade ago, I'd been conditioned to believe that my first instinct - to bristle, to snap back - was an overreaction. The assaults, the gropings, the unwanted invitations, the catcalls, the glances. My new moon pledge to stop gaslighting myself was about the slew of sexual harassment I'd encountered throughout my life that I'd learned to discount. He manipulates her, turning what she knows to be true into what she thinks to be true until, in her mind, it is no longer true at all. People use "gaslighting" to refer to those times when a man makes a woman believe she's crazy. I'd meant my entire life, but I didn't say that. "I feel like I've been gaslighting myself for months." "I'm so grateful to be in this space of women," I blurted out, starting to cry a little. But in this moment, with the logs crackling, I couldn't help myself. I'm not usually the type to correlate what's happening in the celestial world - full moon, half moon, fingernail-clipping moon - to what's happening with me. We were setting our new moon intentions: What were we hoping to rid ourselves of in the days ahead? What were we hoping to achieve? Not that I'd ever seen.Ī month ago, as news of Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault allegations roiled news cycles, I found myself in New Mexico, sitting around a fire with a bunch of women in the middle of the woods on a writer's retreat. Never mind that nobody went swimming in that river. Maybe he was off somewhere laughing hysterically, chugging beers while telling his buddies about our misplaced horror. Maybe we'd interfered with his plan to relax. I'd known that to be true in other situations, so why couldn't it be true in this case? Maybe this man had been trying to skinny-dip. I told myself that memory has a way of distorting reality. We barely talked about it to one another. We didn't want to weather the skepticism or face the fact that we'd skirted something more sinister. We called the cops, who took our statements and gave us Band-Aids.Īfterward, we told nobody else. I shouted at the man while my friend and I scrambled up the rocks and raced through the woods that separated us from the parking lot. Every person who has been sexually assaulted or harassed knows this sensation. We were on a precarious set of jagged rocks - the type that could easily break ankles - and full of panic. Until that moment, I'd never understood how it felt to be trapped. A man, maybe in his 40s or 50s, had stripped nude and was approaching us, waving his erect penis. We were midconversation when my friend whispered, "There's a naked man over there." Sure enough, there was. We hadn't seen anyone in the hour we'd been there. When I was 16, I was sitting with my best friend in a park by the Connecticut River on a tumble of rocks. In the 1944 film Gaslight, Gregory (Charles Boyer) slowly tricks his wife, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), into believing she is insane.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |