Spit On It: Anatomy of Hawk Tuah, a Microcelebrity Trend Gone Horribly Wrong

She was talking about spitting on a penis.

Andy Warhol notoriously said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. In the era of social media and side-hustle culture, not only has it become horrifyingly true but it’s now the ultimate dream. You too can turn your flash-in-the-pan experience with celebrity into a multi-million dollar, long-term commodity. This is what capitalism wants: for you to turn miming a sex act into a crypto scam.

For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided this whole problem, let me summarize it as quickly as I can. On June 11, 2024, a YouTube channel called Tim & Dee TV, which specializes in man-on-the-street interviews, released a video featuring an interview with Haliey Welch in the Broadway district of Nashville. During the chat, she was asked a series of sexual questions, one of which was, ‘What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?’ She replied, ‘You gotta give ‘em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang.’ For some reason, this minor six-second clip of a woman talking about spitting on a dick during oral sex became a huge deal.

It earned Welch, who had previously been working at a mattress factory, instant fame. She decided to cash in on it. She founded a company under which she registered various trademarks, got an agent, sold merch, and began a podcast called Talk Tuah, which has featured guests as varied as Whitney Cummings, Jake Paul, and Jojo Siwa. At one point, it was in the top three of the Spotify podcast charts. Welch has claimed she is now a millionaire in the space of six months, based solely on Hawk Tuah.

Things began to fall apart when, earlier this week, Welch launched her own cryptocurrency meme coin called HAWK. Yes, this is a thing. Welch claimed it was a serious investment and not a cash grab, but less than 24 hours after its launch, at least one investor had already filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Coffeezilla, the YouTuber and crypto journalist, accused her and her team of insider trading, using her ‘fans’ to help fuel a pump-and-dump scheme.

Let’s just sum this nightmare up: In less than half a year, we’ve gone from seeing a drunk girl talking about oral sex on camera to a potentially illegal crypto deal that could have scammed thousands of people out of their life savings. It took six months for a meme to become, well, this. So, how did we get here? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to that but I’m going to give it a go.

I don’t blame Welch for deciding to cash in on this moment. If I was working minimum wage in a job I hated and suddenly the world wanted more of me because of a dumb thing I said while drunk, I would put my name on so many hats and ensure I got a few quid out of it. It’s not uncommon for people who change the pop culture lexicon to be left empty-handed. Everyone else put ‘Big D*ck Energy’ on merch but the person who popularized that discourse never saw a penny. Becoming insta-famous is often treacherous and scary. You don’t have the traditional foundations of celebrity, like a publicist, to help you through this weird time when everyone cares about you and is waiting for you to become the next Milkshake Duck. Why not ride the wave while it lasts?

But said wave is now expected to be years long. It’s meant to be the foundation for your long-term financial security. Again, I get the appeal. Why not turn a meme into the launching pad for your career as a media personality? Everyone can start a podcast but now you can get big-name guests, major sponsors, and someone else to do all the editing. Maybe it’ll get the attention of a casting agent or you can launch a music career. Addison Rae now makes pretty good bops with the help of Charli XCX. It can be done. The issue with Welch is a combination of waning novelty, weird political intrusions, and sheer greed.

For some reason, the idea of spitting on a dick during oral sex became a politically contentious issue, but not for the reasons you might suspect. Welch was adopted by the perennially online right-wing as a figure of MAGA-esque freedom and anti-woke force for her brief moment in the spotlight. Reporter Reese Gorman from Slate noticed a few Donald Trump supporters in Virginia donning shirts that read “SPIT ON THAT THANG” below images of his awful face. There was something about this young white woman being drunk and dirty that made some people lose their minds and claim her as proof that the left is losing at sex or something (I’m confused: are lefties supposed to be corrupting deviants or unbearable prudes? Pick a lane.) Maybe that’s why so many people decided to put so much money into the crypto equivalent of the wallet inspector. Stick it to the libs?

The commodification of everything is exhausting. Living within the smothering confines of late-stage capitalism is a total nightmare with no escape in sight. It’s understandable why you’d want to cash in on something as peurile and absurd as a sex joke, but then everything becomes about the money. Rising out one jokes means you will inevitably have to start talking about literally anything else, from politics to activism to whatever the hot take of the day is. And it’s all for sale, much in the same way our lives are. Every home is a potential AirBnb, every car a possible Uber, and every Tik Tok clip your route to millions. If you’re lucky, have a decent head on your shoulders and good people around you, you can get through it without falling into absolute mania. But the chances are you’ll most likely end up surrounded by creeps like the Paul brothers who see a quick buck to be made and string you along for the ride. Maybe you’ll get an agent or publicist but usually you’ll be the one trying to figure out the scam from the safe call, and when you’re young, dumb, and full of spit, why wouldn’t you pick the thing everyone says will make you more money? This is not to strip Welch away from the responsibility she bears for being part of a supposed scam, but it is a reminder that the addictive trauma of celebrity corrupts at a record pace.

I once saw someone online theorize that society just doesn’t know how to take things seriously anymore. It was a somewhat glib analysis but it did make me wonder how much this irony-poisoned, eternally nihilistic viewpoint dominates the ways we allow things like a Hawk Tuah crypto scandal to happen. MAGA jokes, meme coins, and one-liner world philosophies aren’t the stuff of earnestness or altruism. Maybe it’s the inevitable endgame of a burning world where a lot of people feel they have no future. But replacing a bad system with an even worse one is unhelpful and tedious. Turning one clip of sex advice into a financial and political worldview isn’t the stuff of serious people, nor is it an understandable reflection of a poisoned well from which we all drink. All jokes wear thin eventually, but most of them aren’t used to prop up what amounts to genuine contempt for others.

I don’t think the rise (and impending fall) of Welch is some symbol of an apocalyptic quandary as some have dramatically posited. It’s easy to take something that’s ultimately this frivolous and turn it into a symbol of a wider issue. She is, however, yet another example of how a fraudulent system of fame, scams, and irony-poisoned callousness will always end badly for the majority of us. It’s hard to feel sympathy for someone who may have invested tens of thousands of dollars into something that was never going to work, all because they’ve made one joke their entire personalities, but we shouldn’t cheer on the system that created such a situation. It’s okay to let the joke die.