Asian soap with their spectacular representation of consumen culture, have emerged as the most popular television genre among malay women audiences. this has caused a certain degree of anxiety amongst the local authorities who fear that consumerism has a corruptive effect on the cultural integrity of malay womanhood. we conducted interviews with rural malay women, to investigate how women engaged with the images of consumerist modernity depicted in these soaps. in this paper, we want to argue that malay women do not passively submit to the lures of consumerism, as the authorities allege. instead, malay women are discerning viewers who engage critically with the elements of consumer culture in asian soaps through a worldview formed by malay cultural values. we elaborate three tactics of such a process of negotiation with relation to the consumerist images of presentationof self: perceiving image as a distant spectacle, observing islamic injunctions regarding female and exercising personal judgment.