Gabrielle #17 – Hawk Tuah

Anatomy of a cool sexy blonde.

This week’s newsletter was meant to be a continuation of my ode to men, but something more interesting has happened. So allow me to put that on ice while I address a very Gabrielle series of events involving a hot girl, the internet, and spitting.

In short: a woman was interviewed and everyone's heads fell off. In long: a Nashville legend called Hailey Welch had a mic shoved in her face by Tim and Dee TV, which is one of those identikit ‘man on the street’ channels that go around talking to people on nights out. The host asks her “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” And she says, correctly and without pause: “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thing!”

The nonstop wave of memes was to be expected. It’s an immense thing to say, and she was not playing when she said it. The Southern drawl (that thang), the Kel Mitchell “aw here it goes” motion she does with her arms, the fact that she’s only half paying attention because she’s busy hailing her friends across the street… that answer was there in her bones. Locked, loaded, and unconsidered. Every friend group got that one charismatic would-be-stand-up comedian with a turn of phrase that bowls your brain into orbit several times a day, and she is that friend.

If you watch the full video, hawk tuah is just one of many fantastic comments she comes out with during several minutes of… chaos isn’t the right word, because there isn’t any of that. The host, who is boring, is interviewing her friend, who is consciously playing it safe. Occasionally they wrangle Hailey into frame to save them from themselves by saying she’d take backshots over missionary because “I don’t like somebody looking at me in my face” (girl, same), and then the scene lights up like Liberty at Christmas. She’s alive and in the moment, basically. A person, refreshingly at ease with herself, who looks one way and talks another – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

As far as what she says goes: it’s instantly recognisable, to anyone normal, as the female equivalent of locker room talk. The kind of feral sex joke that populates the elusive all-girls group chat, whose contents are tied up in multi-way pacts of mutual destruction because if any of it got out it would turbo-charge the anti-feminist backlash by outing us as much bigger perverts who can’t be trusted around men in shorts and secretly enjoy being catcalled (recent responses to one such incident in one of my GCs include: “yaaaay” and “good mood now x”). Anyway, within a week the clip was viewed half a million times on TikTok, eight million on Instagram, and the Hawk Tuah Girl, as she is now known, became Twitter’s main character for the week. Someone turned it into an oil painting. Then it went fucking weird.

As is often the case when someone goes extremely viral: a lot of people tried to find her. It didn’t take long – someone tracked her down on VSCO – but it didn’t help that Tim and Dee TV encouraged it, sharing more clips and tagging Hailey (who has since scrubbed her social media) and her friend in them. Meanwhile, I’m getting press releases from betting sites where there are odds on her posing nude in Playboy (what is this, 1979?), starting an OnlyFans, and appearing on reality TV within the next year. Joe Rogan is reportedly “amazed” at how quickly she has “capitalised” on her fame by [checks notes] deactivating Instagram and letting a merch company in Tennessee sell hats that she gets some of the proceeds from. A satirical news source claimed she’d been forced to resign from her job as a preschool teacher, which should have been instantly clockable as fake because it gave her a different surname and said she worked at the “Epstein Day School.” But because it’s the sort of thing that definitely could happen, the rumour flew as fact, generating a whole sub-division of discourse about how Teachers Are People Too. All of which is wildly disproportionate to the common 21st century occurrence of a girl in her twenties making a joke about blow jobs.

Here’s the thing: there are girls being funny about sex everywhere, all the time. You would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, based on how sanitised mainstream pop culture has become, but if you make a habit of going outside you will know that media and entertainment is increasingly disconnected from reality (for the first time in my lifetime, at least, reality is… more enjoyable? Which is damning, because reality is bad. I have a black mold problem, a tax bill that’s spiking my blood pressure to Malcolm Tucker Rage Compilation levels, and every day the news reveals a new, previously undiscovered layer of hell. But on the other side, there is Madame Web.)

Everything feels like a simulacra. All the surfaces have been wiped down, like a gay sauna at closing time. Even a meat market show like Love Island has no discernible real sex, and so the skewed landscape of social media is all we have to go by en masse. And on social media sex is subcultural. It’s the domain of young people (who all dress like goths even if they aren’t) and e-girls. The people we see joking about sex are usually alternative looking, actual sex workers, or dolls. Perhaps they run a meme account called sad_cum_girl or something that suggests they have a personality disorder and a lot of books by Anaïs Nin. That’s like 70% of the internet now and it’s completely unremarkable because, rightly or wrongly, it’s expected from those sources – myself included. It doesn’t jar. 

Scrub through the whole Tim and Dee video and you’ll see that they put the question to multiple women who all respond with something equally graphic (“I sit on their dick and I spin around with it still inside”), but none of them have the same allure as “hawk tuah spit on that thing.” There are two reasons for this. The first is obviously that it’s an inspired moment of linguistic genius. If no one was around to record “hawk tuah spit on that thing,” it would still have gone down in friendship group lore. The rest of us are just lucky to be involved.

But the second, much bigger reason is that she is normal. If this was a clip from a Barstool Sports show, it wouldn’t have done the same numbers. If it was Doja Cat, it wouldn’t have done the same numbers. The Red Scare girls say shit more raw than this at least three times per episode. None of that is as intriguing, though, because it broadly aligns with our assumptions about them. This, on the other hand, is a video of a regular Southern lass on a regular night out. She has a baby face, shiny hair, and a Prada necklace. She looks like she belongs to a sorority. She’s the archetypal girl next door and she’s talking about having sex – with men!

The reason the clip has travelled the way that it has comes down to how she looks and where she’s from, because at the end of the day that’s what makes social conservatives pay attention. They see someone like that and they see one of their own – sister, neighbour, whatever. They see a woman they recognise talking about sex and they see something wrong. That’s why Joe Rogan has paid it any mind, why Howard Stern waded in to call her “every dad’s worst nightmare,” and why it’s receiving rolling coverage in The Daily Mail like it’s the fucking war in Afghanistan.

It’s a lot like the Sydney Sweeney effect. Conservative commentators love Sydney Sweeney. They think she’s brilliant. They believe her big natties are “harbingers of the death of woke” (a direct quote). After she hosted SNL in March, multiple right wing news outlets published op-eds about how glorious it is to see a hot blonde giggling in the limelight again. And they would have been right if they were co-signing more sexual freedoms in that regard, but they weren’t. They were arguing against something ideological.

Sydney Sweeney appeals because she’s a generous laugher. She comes across as open and easy going and she trips over her words sometimes, and that’s endearing because we’re primed to find someone that hot incredibly intimidating and she kind of isn’t. There’s a quality of fun about her that’s often mistaken for subservience (a historic blonde projection – see also: Pamela Anderson, Marilyn Monroe, Paris Hilton) but is actually a great personal strength. It’s comically easy to manipulate men as long as you’re smiling, which is the social contract people are actually referring to when they talk about the global political implications of being a 26H.

In the mid-2010s, everything became very serious all of a sudden. Trump signalled the end of decency, the fabric of society could be torn apart by a white girl twerking in a music video. Culture became politics and politics became entertainment. The smallest issue became a massive fight, and while almost everyone is exhausted by that, the atmosphere is the same. Tense, bad mind, deeply boring. Only now we also have a film industry that shies away from honest renderings of desire between men and women post-#MeToo but currently has a sixth Scary Movie in development. (I am literally begging for someone to please think of the heterosexuals.)

To a conservative eye, Sydney Sweeney is the antidote to all that. They aren’t championing her as an actor or even a sex symbol. It didn’t matter that she had been famous for years before she hosted SNL, or that social media has been inundated with fancams of her tits (literally made by the same demographic they assumed must be “hating this!”) since Euphoria aired in 2019. It only mattered that she was, at that point, the most talked about person in the world. And that she fit an archetype that could be successfully weaponised against a culture moving in the wrong direction. She is the way things were.

As an actress, though, Sydney Sweeney is sealed off somewhere safe. The silver glow of her celebrity draws us in and her image tells a story. The homeliness of her brand makes her feel familiar, but she’s also easily projected upon because that’s what fame as a construct does. She’s as much myth as she is mortal. Like a piece of art, Sydney Sweeney can represent whatever anyone wants Sydney Sweeney to represent.

The Hawk Tuah Girl is the exact opposite.

All the same signifiers are present, pointing to a beloved and long-lost cultural export: the fun-loving blonde. But the context alters everything. This girl, as I’ve said, is normal. She could be someone you know. She might literally be someone you know. She hasn’t been plucked out of the huddled masses, primed by a team of agents into something safe for consumption, and advised how to play her cards. There is no plausible deniability around who she is or what she represents. She’s just out here, being class. And to a lot of people – especially now, when we can’t help but see someone in the public domain as a potential actor in the theatre of our own personal interests – that doesn’t make her an innocent character they can use to own the libs. That makes her a threat. A fun-loving blonde is all well and good until she’s in your house, I guess. Go figure.

“Unapologetic” is one of the most overused words of the last decade. I get at least ten PR blasts a day about some artist or another whose new project finds them being bravely, unapologetically themselves – and even if it hadn’t become another empty marketing term, what it refers to in that context is performative anyway. It’s art; a construct. Hawk tuah is one of the most genuinely unapologetic things I have seen in ages, because it shows me a cool normal girl, having a cool normal laugh. She doesn’t stand to gain anything from it. She’s out here with joy in her heart and pure love of the game.

Our response? To slap it across a t-shirt and bet on whether she’ll do porn next. How miserable. We’re all so fucking repressed that we’re thrown into a state of collective disarray when presented with something everybody does. Even loving her is a sign of decline, because it shows how far we have fallen from frivolity, how afraid we are of our desires. A joke that may not have made it to the quotes section of Superbad’s IMDb page 15 years ago is now an incredible novelty. How did we let that happen?

We have resigned ourselves to the dry hand job of modern popular culture when what we need now, more than ever, is wads and wads of spit on it. Sad.