The other night I got into a really big argument with someone I had considered a very close friend. He said “women are crazy” and I got upset with him for making a sweeping generalization.

The meat of the argument was in his inability to understand why that upset me. Now if you look at my About page, you’ll see that I write these posts because I can express my thoughts and ideas much better in writing than I can in any given conversation. So for the first time, I’m addressing something very personal, that I couldn’t find the words to say, through a post. I can only hope he doesn’t hold it against me.

When you say something enough times, or hear something enough times, it becomes true. The phrase “women are crazy” is an example of this paradox. Men (and women) use this phrase frequently as a derogatory statement against all women because of the actions of a specific subset. This was the case in my disagreement with my friend. He was referring to interactions with a few different women within the last couple of days.

The phrase acts as an excuse for why women do what we do. It eliminates blame and dehumanizes the women in question by creating the assumption that every response is due to insanity rather than rationality. This excuse allows men to distance themselves from the problem that caused the emotional response regarded as crazy. Instead of practicing empathy and recognizing her feelings, people are quick to excuse and label.

This becomes the most damaging when women internalize these ideas. Women talk about legitimate concerns, and emotions regarding things happening in their lives, and write them off by calling themselves crazy. They don’t fix the problem, they don’t address the issue, they deprecate themselves, call themselves crazy, and practice this theory that their opinions, their ideas, and their feelings don’t matter. Calling women crazy may not seem like it directly harms your friends, family members, and loved ones who are women, but it contributes to a larger problem of misogyny in our culture and society, which will in turn negatively impact the women in our lives one day.

If you have half the population believing they don’t matter, that they aren’t important, you aren’t benefiting from that half of the population’s intellect, or talent, or ability. How can we have a productive and functioning society if only half of the population is contributing?

It may be easy to continue on as we have recently, calling women crazy or emotional and excusing those behaviors by making assumptions about where women are in their menstrual cycle, but progress is made through little things. Progress is made when we become conscious of the little things that we say and do to reinforce stereotypes and ideas. It is imperative that we begin recognizing these problems in everyday life and correcting them. One of the biggest problems that is important to recognize is these generalizations.

Think of Emma Watson’s He For She campaign. She talks about both the ways women are sexualized and the ways men are desensitized. People don’t expect men to have strong emotions and occasionally criticize or derogate men who do. Those are also generalizations and they can harm individuals and society just as much as the ones about women and their emotions.

The combination of those two commonplace generalizations contributes to the creation of this rift between men and women. Instead of putting each other and ourselves down in opposing ways, we need to start working towards a common ground. We need to start to recognize what equality truly means and begin taking strides towards equality in our society.