Oprah is ruining my relationship with my mother.

My mother gets most of her understanding of the world from “The View” and “Oprah”. Which means my mother’s mothering technique of her adult aged daughter involves discussing pertinent topics raised by self-help books and catch phrases by Dr. Phil et al. While I try to listen to her, there are some times when I just snap. There are just so many times I can hear “you teach people how to treat you”, and “he’s just not that into you”. Maybe I should just learn not to share with my mother. But habits die hard even when they always lead to fights, her hanging up the phone on me, and me feeling like I slighted her and feel responsible and guilty.
I do not care if he’s just not that into me most of the time. Honestly I probably care even less. He’s a warm body until something better comes along; now try explaining that to your mother. Already older than she was when she had me, explaining the delay of marriage and family to my mother is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to my dog. She wants a successful daughter, but for her, she thinks you can have it all, but still in a particularly domestic fashion. This means I should become an attorney and in her universe attorneys are allowed to not work for 6 years until their children are old enough to enter the school system.
Her most recent lecture involves giving me the gift of fear. Why thank you, but I will have to respectfully decline such a lovely and thoughtful present.
What she is referring to is this new book by Gavin De Becker where he basically states that women are weak and should listen to their inner voice when in situations. While I am not averse to listening to one’s “gut”, I am incredibly dubious of self-help books and their power over people like my mother. By creating a culture of female victims preemptively, what is this saying for female empowerment? What sort of moral panic are we constructing as our starting out point that women need to live in this heightened sense of self-awareness that around every corner lurks a rapist and a murderer. I am not living in victim land population women, nor do I like the position-ality it creates to begin with. I staunchly reject that just being a woman places me in a position of natural victim and obvious prey. While I agree, we need to be aware of the signs around us and the warnings that we are sometimes oblivious to, I do not think anyone needs a “gift of fear”.
A gift of fear, what does that even mean? To be gifted fear, fear of what? Of whom and why? (There are obvious racial and class based problems with this assumption) And what sort of gift is this? Can I exchange it for a gift of self-confidence, or perhaps equality, or maybe even reliable and credible statistics and citations for said book? Fear is an emotion that is culturally constructed. This is just the next moral panic that preys upon women who are already fearful and a society unable to rationalize violence and structural reasoning behind them. We blame individuals not the structures that created them. I am not going to live my life in fear of those who do not have the privileges that I have. I am not going to fear those who are darker skinned or lower class just because society has conditioned me to see that as suspect. This book provides the reader with a worldview that everything in life is meant to be feared, and that by being hyper vigilant you can avoid rape, murder, school shootings, etc. I would prefer the gift of common sense and social awareness.