THERE is, doubtless, hardly a person watching ITV's Love Island who hasn’t been so nauseated by the manoeuvrings of resident snake, Adam Collard, that they haven’t wanted to hiss the man off their screens. That Adam is a slippery viper has been widely agreed, all over social media, as we’ve watched him churn through the dates, often with a smirk.

But, last week, when Adam attempted to move on from Rosie Williams, who he had spent 10 days with in a kind of romance, to newcomer Zara McDermott, while somehow blaming it all on Rosie, the tone of reaction changed. Adam was, some said, involved in the kind of manipulative behaviour that is often described as gaslighting. Katie Ghose, chief executive of Women’s Aid even issued a statement saying so. She explained: “In a relationship, a partner questioning your memory of events, trivialising your thoughts or feelings, and turning things around to blame you can be part of a pattern of gaslighting and emotional abuse.”

Now I think we need to be careful here, because some of these terms are loaded. I’m uncomfortable with the idea that someone who is playing a role in a game show, might get labelled an abuser off the back of such behaviour. Yet, at the same time, it seems to me that Women’s Aid was right to use this opportunity to communicate some warnings about gaslighting to the young audience of Love Island. The more we talk about coercive control patterns, the stronger we feel about calling them out when we see them. And, actually, that’s exactly what Rosie Williams did. She took Adam to task for his behaviour.

Rather than watch more Love Island snakiness, however, I’d advise people to take time out to watch one of the two film versions of Gaslight, the play which was the origin of the term. I remember, as a teenager, being haunted by the 1944 film, which stars Ingrid Bergman as a young woman who gets married to a man who systematically undermines her sense of reality.

The story essentially features a murderer who snakes his way into a young woman’s life, so as to get into a house where he knows some stolen jewels are hidden. Once there, he makes her feel she is going mad by accusing her of removing pictures from the wall, which she did not take down, questioning her versions of events, and generally isolating her.

Once you think about gaslighting you start to see it everywhere – not just in domestic relationships, but in our wider culture. Hence it’s no surprise that it’s become part of our political language, as well as the way we talk about relationships. Our era of fake news, denial and dissembling, has brought many a gaslighting story.

Political and domestic gaslighting are not unconnected. At the heart of both are issues of power. What’s remains vital, all these years after Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gas Light, premiered in 1938, is that gaslighting is called out, discussed and recognised. In the play, it’s when the young wife starts to work out what is going on that she becomes empowered. As Rosemary Erickson Johnsen wrote last year in the Los Angeles Review Of Books: “Hamilton dramatises the essential point: if you can observe and interpret, if you can name what is being done, these moves resist the insanity-inducing effects the perpetrator is aiming for.”

So, yes, Rosie Williams and Women’s Aid, call it out. We need it to be said that decency matters, the truth matters, and those who manipulate it cannot get away with it.

LAST week, in World Cup Russia, when Burger King offered women of the country the chance to win around £35,000 and a lifetime’s supply of Whoppers if they managed to get impregnated by international football superstars, it seemed like it was one of those adverts that was better suited for whipping feminists up into a lather than actually selling burgers.

Of course, it was hard, for us non-Russians to tell the tone of the advert, which talked about laying “down the success of the Russian international football team”. What was clear was that it was part of a wider discussion which began when Russian politician Tamara Pletnyova advised that women do not have sex with foreign visitors because their mixed-race children might face discrimination. The fact, however, that Burger King has now withdrawn the advert and apologised, suggests that it was not some laudable feminist satire.

Meanwhile, as we gawp in horror, because nothing like that would ever happen here, we might want to remind ourselves of Irn Bru's Bruzil campaign of 2014. The premise of these adverts was that the best plan to get Scotland to a future World Cup would be to bring over some Brazilians to have children with us. One advert, for instance, delivered us a Scottish mum singing a lullaby with the words, “Hush little Pele. Lay down to nap. We’re going to make you a Scotland cap. All Scottish heart and Samba skills, because mum’s from Dundee and daddy’s from Brazil. That’s the main reason, I did the deed. To help my national team succeed.”