Excitement is a response to something that may indicate a positive change in the future. If you get an interview for a job you actually want, you get excited. If you are accepted to your first choice school, you become excited. However, it seems as if women are expected to become excited over mundane occurrences.

It’s one thing for a very young person to get excited about going back to school, or going to the prom, etc. However, adult women are expected to get excited and become ebullient about average, every day life. Women are expected to be excited about getting a low paying job or become thrilled about moving into their first house. I don’t see men becoming excited the same way about being offered an entry level position in their late 20’s. I mean, it’s a given that men should work.

Women must feign gratitude and pretend to be famous when they are offered jobs; basically, whenever a resource is allocated to a woman no matter how paltry a sum it may be, she is expected to be ebullient at the prospect and to preen about it as if she won the lottery.

Thrown into the mix, is the concept of hysteria. A female college graduate with a 4.0 GPA is offered an executive assistant role over the phone and then, when she is done having a happy fit about the opportunity, the men in power look upon her like she is hysterical. It’s a no win situation. On the one hand, women are expected to want an average life and when they obtain this run-of-the-mill existence, it is expected of them to act as if they are famous and thrilled with the normalcy of their life.

When women do not have happy responses to an average existence, people question their mental health. So, if a woman gets married to some guy, she is expected to be ecstatic and have events and inform the world of her decision to accept an offer of marriage from some average Joe who is looking for a relationship out of convenience.

Over the years, I have always been fascinated by the excited reaction I see from women to popular musicians at rock concerts, or at large events where the focal point of the event are famous people. Women crowd stages shrieking for these more successful people because of their minority status as second class citizens.

These excited reactions are a manifestation of discrimination. When something happens that could potentially indicate a positive change in the future, women get excited about the idea of a better existence. People in power often exploit this so-called “hysteria” in offices, households and in the educational system.

These excited reactions occur from a place of oppression and are then utilized to keep women in their place. So women get excited about becoming a middle school teacher, then a carrot of greater success is dangled, their excitement is peaked and the excited becomes a replacement for the actual achievement of success. There is no progress made only an excited reaction that is then attributed to the female sex.

So the next time you see the manifestation of hysteria, you should know what it really represents.