The internet truly is a cesspool of viral moments that would send a Victorian child into cardiac arrest. Scroll long enough and you’ll see a cop going viral for flying off of a slide, tattooed twin brothers kissing, and — most recently — a drunkenly-made blowjob joke. Yes, we’re talking about the “Hawk Tuah” girl.
Many people first encountered Haliey Welch on TikTok, with one of the videos amassing over twenty million views. The viral moment is clipped from a YouTube street interview by Tim and Dee TV, where they walk around Nashville and interview intoxicated women about “what makes a man go crazy in bed.”
Welch’s response, as most of the Internet knows, is “you gotta give it that ‘hawk-tuah’ and spit on that thang.”
The video gained traction right away on straight frat-bro internet, and then spread to other spheres of the web like wildfire. Welch, who had no significant social media presence before the video, promptly quit her job at a bed spring factory in order to kick off an influencer career.
Poking fun at critiques of only having fifteen minutes of fame, Welch started a company called 16 Minutes and has so far sold more than $65,000 worth of “Hawk Tuah” trucker hats. She’s making appearances in New York for $30,000, peddling paywalled content on Fanfix, and hanging out with Shaq and Luke Bryant. Even if her name disappears into the Internet archive, she is reaping the benefits of her viral moment.
Here’s the thing: people have gone viral before for no reason. Remember Alex from Target? He blew up at age sixteen for – wait for it – being a “cute guy” working at Target. There’s also the Damn Daniel video, which had temporarily made its way into the Millenial and Gen Z vernacular back in 2015. These were arguably bigger internet sensations, but they have long been retired and the people featured in them are living normal lives.
So what is it about Haliey Welch that allows her to have life-changing success from just a blowjob joke? Why is the internet so quick to hoist her status up to stardom instead of laughing and scrolling on? We’d argue that it’s a combination of things: pretty privilege, society’s compulsion toward rewarding white mediocrity, and the evolution over the last decade from traditional celebrity to influencer.
“Influencer culture” is an extremely new phenomenon. Journalist Taylor Lorenz attributes the rise in social media monetization to the creators who figured out how to become brands in their own right, selling themselves as the product and then profiting from tech companies. It really wasn’t until the second half of the 2000s that viral culture became more mainstream, with the emergence of viral guests on the Ellen Show.
Fast forward to today: the Ellen Show is over, but people don’t need traditional media to be the intermediary between the internet and a larger audience. When the pandemic hit, we lost a lot of IRL spaces, and so the internet became the sole place for people to congregate. TikTok contributed to the faster cycles of virality without mainstream media exponentially: it served as a space for people to “self-commodify.” This seems pretty democratic, right?
Not always. It turns out that despite the media industry’s loosening grip over determining fame, there is still inequality over who gets to go viral. Take Charli D’Amelio, for example. She had a viral video back in 2021 for doing a dance to the song “Renegade,” massively monetizing off of her views and even performing the dance on Jimmy Fallon. Turns out the dance was invented by someone else completely: a Black girl named Jalaiah Harmon (who got none of the credit).
Going viral is often random, yes – but for influencers to continue to monetize, they need to be held up by management teams and brands. The truth is that generic white people are super monetizable – especially those who are conventionally attractive and don’t challenge the status quo.
Only time will tell whether or not Haliey Welch can brand herself separately from “Hawk Tuah” girl. But her rise to viral popularity is a reminder of the societal forces that shape our digital world — and the power of a good blowjob joke.
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