JANUARY 17 — It was a sad and sombre week filled with death, but a series of photos I saw on Friday lifted my spirits for a bit.
It was in some ways, a historic event: that Kelantan Football Association (Kafa) signed a RM16 million sponsorship deal with Vida Beauty Sdn Bhd, owned by the omnipresent and fabulously bling bling Hasmizah Othman
Also known as Datuk Seri Vida, the 44-year-old returned to the media spotlight last year after she sponsored awards show Anugerah Juara Lagu (AJL) to the tune of RM3 million; blatant promotion took over the show and invited backlash from some.
Vida has confessed to falling into depression for about a year prior to that period, due to a 2013 fire that took the lives of her two sons in Ipoh. But what a comeback she has staged.
Not many thought Vida could top herself after AJL, but she did. She has dominated much of the Malay-language media this month after news that she will be sponsoring the Kelantan football club was leaked.
The meteoric rise of Vida and her 10-year-old company has an interesting feminist angle. This woman has nonchalantly asserted herself into the macho world of football, simply by holding her own purse strings. In this case, the purse has turned out to be quite fat indeed.
It is something not unheard of in the east coast, especially in Kelantan, where it is common to see enterprising women up early in the morning at the market, with numerous fat gold bangles around their wrists as a mark of their hard-earned wealth.
Vida reportedly said she had enough funds to sponsor two more teams besides Kelantan, if she wished to. And she played the hell out of her cards in the days after her first meeting with Kafa’s president Annuar Musa, even toying and teasing rival teams such as Selangor.
Vida left Kafa baffled by her ballsy terms as a sponsor: to paint Kelantan’s home ground stadium in pink, and append the team’s nickname, The Red Warriors, with names of her products, the Pamoga health drink, and the Qu Puteh whitening product.
It was public knowledge that The Red Warriors were desperate for funds to mount a challenge in the new season so this deal was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
During the media conference on Friday, Vida managed to get all those macho men of Kelantan football, even Annuar himself, to wear pink. She even managed to get them to strike her trademark pose for the photographers: a V-sign over their lips — probably mouthing her tagline “Qu Puteh, Qu Puteh, barulah putih.” I just had to laugh.
In one fell swoop, Vida shattered the fragile masculinity of some men who are terrified of the colour pink, associating it with the effeminate, the weak, and the queer.
Ever since Vida dominated headlines with her sponsorship stunt, her competitors were sent scrambling for football clubs to sponsor.
Utusan reported on Thursday that one of her biggest competitors, D’Herbs Holding Sdn Bhd owned by the more charismatic and charmingly good looking Aliff Syukri, might sponsor Selangor.
Ditto rivals Nouvelles Visages and Megah Perawan Sdn Bhd. Even those outside the industry played along — Kedah has confirmed that it approached tycoon Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhary for a RM35 million lifeline.
Surely this is amazing news: the commercialisation of Malaysian football away from state-owned football squads, and wealthy monarchy-funded clubs like Johor Darul Ta’zim which just received a whopping RM50 million fund injection from Sultan Ibrahim Ismail.
Vida’s story may be a wonderful female power tale, but we should not forget that her wealth was based on that basest of human weaknesses: insecurity.
Just like other whitening products, her Qu Puteh line of products bases itself on the premise that only fair women are attractive. The latest marketing for that line promotes slimness, nubility and bustiness as qualities that her customers should strive for.
Her pomegranate and gamat-based Pamoga elixir is an even more atrocious exercise in pseudoscience. Priced at RM145 per a 500ml bottle, Vida claims that it is able to ridiculously cure 30 illnesses, ranging from diabetes and Alzheimer’s, to low IQ and paralysis.
Of course, Vida Beauty is not the sole offender of this kind of exploitation.
Aliff Syukri’s D’Herbs also sells everything from raisins that promise to make you clever, to goat’s milk that claims to help with pregnancy, to superfood elixir Arjuna Maxx that supposedly increases virility, to Payu Up Collagen that claims to increase bust size, and even cock rings.
Yup, you read that right. The rings are magnificently named “Cincin Pacak Arjuna.”
These are the sort of products that you will find in a typical booth selling health and beauty products targeted at Malay women.
Therefore, it is disturbing that Vida is using her purported PhD title in Biology, to the point of calling herself “Dr Vida”, to lend credibility to her products.
Vida previously claimed her PhD was from one Charles Molnar University from Hungary, coincidentally among the five universities linked to a 2012 bust against a Subang Jaya company which issued fake degrees — three of the others did not even exist.
By the time Vida was interviewed by Utusan last year, she reportedly claimed that the PhD was from Monash University instead.
It is undeniable that Vida can be a positive role model for girls, but only to the extent of achieving that quintessential material dream that many Malays crave. After all, who does not love a story of a woman making her mark in the patriarchal Malaysian world?
But perhaps we can raise the bar a little higher, yes?
Meanwhile, a future where hundreds of macho Kelantanese men can be seen wearing pink to the games, or roaming the night market of Wakaf Che Yeh — with pride rather than irony — would be an amusing social phenomenon to observe indeed.
