When Your Viral Moment Comes, Will You Be Goldfish Guy or Hawk Tuah Girl?

A few weeks ago, my husband told me that a clip of our wedding vows appeared on his cousin’s For You Page and had already racked up nearly 600,000 views. I was immediately tense. 

By Alise Morales  |  July 25, 2024 | 6:07pm
Screenshot: Tim & Dee TV/ Youtube Entertainment
When Your Viral Moment Comes, Will You Be Goldfish Guy or Hawk Tuah Girl?

The For You Page is a bi-monthly column by Alise Morales that explores, inspects, traverses, sifts through, and dives into internet culture. 

It’s been just over a month since the world was first introduced to Hailey Welch–better known as Hawk Tuah Girl–via a viral video posted by the man-on-the-street interview team Tim and Dee TV. In the 12-second clip outside a bar in Nashville, Welch is asked the age-old question: “What’s the one move in bed that makes a man go crazy?” She jokingly responds with a Southern twang, “Oh you gotta give ‘em that hawk-tuah and spit on that ‘thang.” And thus a mega-meme was born. 

But as I watched this viral moment unfold, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about my own recent experience with unintended virality. Welch, who was working in a “spring factory” at the time the video was filmed (yes–springs like you would find in an old mattress), has since signed with a manager who is already touting “endless” opportunities for their viral client. As of June 26, she’d sold $65,000 in “HAWK TUAH ‘24 SPIT ON THAT THANG” emblazoned hats, according to Rolling Stone. She’s been featured on podcasts, been meme’d on every platform imaginable, and invited onstage at a Zach Bryan concert. As far as spitting-on-a-dick-related virality goes, things appear to be going pretty well for Welch. And that’s good! It’s ultimately a funny, charming, harmless video and she deserves to make a buck off it if she can. 

I think Welch got pretty lucky. But what is a person supposed to do when they’re going viral with a video that is entirely out of their own hands, and they don’t end up so lucky?

A few weeks ago, I was dicking around on my phone when my husband told me that a video of our wedding vows, posted by our wedding videographer almost three years after the fact, appeared on his cousin’s For You Page and had already racked up nearly 600,000 views. He was excited, but I was immediately tense. 

@toastweddings “Till death do us part” 🫨🤯😆 #weddingvows #weddingceremony #weddingday #groom #weddingvideo #fypage ♬ original sound – TOAST WEDDINGS

Sure, the moment was wholesome and posted in good faith, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from hosting my podcast and covering social media for this column, it’s that wholesome content posted in good faith is not always received that way. 

Take, for example, the story of “Goldfish Guy”–a British man who tweeted about taking in a half-dead goldfish, only to be hounded by Twitter because he wasn’t already perfectly prepared to immediately take in a half-dead goldfish. For the unfamiliar, “Goldfish Guy” was briefly Twitter’s main character after sharing his story of finding the barely alive fish in the middle of his lawn and having it swim around an old freezer tray until he could get a real aquarium.

He was quickly picked up by Goldfish Twitter (yes, there is a Goldfish Twitter) who lambasted Goldfish Guy (his real name is Ben Beska) for choosing the wrong size tank, demanding to know the water conditions in his hastily thrown-together aquarium, and in one case, accusing him of being “MAGA,” despite the fact that Beska is British. 

This is one of many cases of virality-gone-bad that I’ve followed. (Who can forget the saga of the woman who enjoys having coffee with her husband?) So when my own wedding video popped up on Twitter, my mind immediately began to go to these worst-case scenarios. Could I be the next Goldfish Guy? Was bridal Twitter going to hound me for…whatever they decided we did wrong? Was I going to wake up tomorrow morning to a slew of TikTok “body language experts” stitching one of the most intimate moments of my life to say my posture indicates that I clearly feel unsafe? What if my video made it to the rightwing manosphere where dudes in wraparound sunglasses would stitch us from their car to ask, “Fellas, is it gay to be excited about marrying your wife?” Or what if my choice to follow my husband’s lead in excited wedding squealing was taken as tradwife content, to be picked apart and analyzed for its subversive messaging? Regardless of how it was received, I wasn’t the one who posted it. If the situation did spiral into a worst-case scenario, it was completely out of my control. 

Just like my wedding videographer, Tim and Dee TV were well within their rights to post a video they’d taken–and that Welch had knowingly participated in–to boost their account. But what if Welch had changed her mind? What if in the sober light of day, she realized she’d rather not have participated in an interview about sex, or that it could negatively affect her in a way she hadn’t fully thought through while standing outside a Nashville bar late at night? (The Girls Gone Wild-like ethos of conducting these interviews in the first place is a topic for a different day.) And even if, at Hawk Tuah Girl’s request, Tim and Dee TV agreed to take the video down, we all know that in the world of stitches, saves, and downloads, once a video is out there, it’s out there, and there’s really no getting it back. 

Case in point, the original Tim and Dee TV Hawk Tuah video has a surprisingly low number of views given its cultural impact. In the comments of that first video, they recently wrote: “So many people stole it that TikTok flagged our own video as unoriginal reposted content so it’s not shown on the for you page. Gotta visit our page to see it 👎 thnx to everyone who stole our vids.” 

But back to my (gorgeous, elegant, meticulously planned) wedding. Ultimately, the video racked up one million views on TikTok and four million on Instagram. None of my worst-case scenarios came to pass, but there have been commenters with less than kind things to say. People called us “cringe” and labeled my husband’s enthusiasm a “red flag.” There were also people who gleefully declared we’d be divorced within the year. These types of comments are why–had I been asked–I would have said I prefer to keep the moment private. 

I realized I’ve raised more questions than answers here with this meditation on virality, and that I’m not the first person to raise these questions. In the end, my anxiety about the video was totally unfounded. Most of the comments were positive and my husband shared none of my reservations about the video’s viral moment. (If you can’t tell from the clip, he’s our household’s optimist.) I’m not even mad at my wedding videographer for posting their work, which they correctly realized had the potential to go far on social media–an obvious boon for their business.

So how do I even feel about this all? Maybe I’m just salty that my brush with virality only resulted in a day of unfounded anxiety and not a $65,000 merch-worthy catchphrase. I also didn’t even get a BuzzFeed article outlining how the internet did me wrong out of the deal. Or maybe I’m just frustrated with the fact that all my actual attempts to go viral with my comedy were so easily overshadowed by a 30-second clip of my authentic life posted by somebody else. At the end of the day, I’m happy not to be Hawk Tuah Girl, Goldfish Guy, or any of the other social media main characters that crop up on a given day. If you can’t already tell, my anxiety can’t handle it. 

 
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