You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone and welcome back on today's episode.

We will be discussing teens and cancel culture.

So Dr. Ken, would you start out by

defining cancel culture for us because maybe a term that we've heard, but we don't really

understand or know exactly what people are talking about. Well, it's, you know, it's funny. I was

thinking about this this morning. Cancel culture is really such a polite term for a mob mentality.

I think in the old Frankenstein movie, when the townspeople all lit torches and headed out to attack and kill the monster, I don't think anyone said, you know, let's be a cancel culture.

We're a mob and we're trying to get rid of evil, what we think is evil. So, you know,

but it technically would be basically a modern form of ostracism. It's public shaming. And, you know,

and you hear about it rather a lot. The latest person canceled was Dr. Seuss.

I think you heard.

You might have heard this.

Ironically, out of such fear of the mob, my understanding was there hasn't actually been a bunch of outrage about some of Dr. Seuss books.

This is a publisher getting ahead of the game before the mob even grabs torches to say, wait a minute, we think these

possibly might be offensive to you. And again, not so we're going to be sensitive and loving.

It's we're going to protect ourselves because if we don't, you're going to come and try to hurt us.

You might have, and this, by the way, isn't just a sort of left wing thing.

A long time ago, there was a, you may have heard of a group called the Dixie Chicks.

And they were singers and they were, you know, country. And they, I think, said some things

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