Gay feminist teen blows the internet up with her yearbook quote
If yearbook quotes were performed live on stage, in front of the entire world — as opposed to written down and then published months later for a few hundred students — 17-year-old Caitlyn Cannon could very well have dropped the mic after sharing hers.
Instead, she's experiencing the digital equivalent of making a stadium erupt with her words: Going viral.
Cannon, who recently graduated from Oak Hills High School in California, is the toast of the web this week for penning a powerful yearbook quote that somehow fuses feminism, the wage gap, gay rights and humour in just one sentence:
"I need feminism because I intend on marrying rich and I can't do that if my wife and I are making .75 cent for every dollar a man makes."
A photo of Cannon's yearbook photo and quote was tweeted by a friend on Tuesday with the caption "this is all I honestly care about right now."
It has since been retweeted nearly 10,000 times, favourited more than 13,500 times, and picked up by news outlets all over the world.
After sharing the photo on her own Tumblr blog Wednesday, it racked up a whopping 132,000 reblogs more in less than 24 hours.
"I was tired of seeing the same old quotes from popular books and movies and authors," said Cannon, who describes herself as "feminist" and "really gay" in her Twitter bio, via email to The Huffington Post. "I wanted to call attention to a problem that women face."
If her goal was to call attention to the specific problem of the gender pay gap — which sees Canadian women earning between 73 cents and 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the CCPA — she certainly achieved it.
The new graduate's yearbook quote has sparked quite a debate on Twitter about the issue, and aside from some "wage gap truthers," the majority of peopleappearsupportive of her message.
When asked about what inspired her yearbook quote, Cannon told the Huffington Post that she had seen a similar message on Tumblr pertaining to men, but that she changed the words to reflect her own identity.
"I've never really been ashamed to say that I am gay," she said. "So the LGBT aspect was simply who I am."
