'Why are you always taking advantage of women?' Terence Cao scolded for hugging yet another female on livestream

Hugging attractive women on livestreams may be good for your viewership but not your personal reputation.

Local actor Terence Cao previously raised eyebrows when he hugged actress Dawn Yeoh from the back on their e-commerce platform Sibay Shiok on multiple livestreams, leading people to speculate if they were romancing each other and if Dawn was pregnant .

Dawn recently clarified that the hugging was mostly a marketing strategy, they were not dating each other, and she saw him as an older brother instead. They said they were also spoofing actress Rebecca Lim's pregnancy announcement to congratulate her.

Last Saturday (Sept 30), Terence, 55, conducted another livestream with a woman named Joyce, who owns a Malaysian beauty product company, and did the same actions of hugging her from the back and leaning his head lovingly against hers.

While the livestreams with Dawn, 37, did not experience much backlash, with many of their viewers congratulating them, there were many netizens making disapproving comments this time around.

"Why are you always taking advantage of women?" one user lambasted.

Another wrote: "Less than one day, hugging a different lady, so flirtatious."

"This again! Don't you have any other tactics?" yet another user questioned.

Terence later defended his actions in a solo livestream in Malacca on Sunday.

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He said: "Joyce asked me how we were going to do our livestream, and I told her we were going to 'rev it up', as we wanted to bring joy and entertainment to our audience.

"We are not only livestream salespeople, but also actors, so we will act out certain scenes on screen and talk about trivial matters. That's all."

In his livestream, he also expressed his sentiments that being misunderstood wasn't a bad thing.

Terence elaborated: "It's good that people are paying attention to me, as it's not right of me to do livestreams with 'nothing [exciting] to give' to our audience.

"We were just hugging and didn't strip! That would have been wrong. Hugging is just to create hype."

Terence also speculated that his viewers might have been outraged because they were not familiar with Joyce.

He continued: "When they see me hugging Dawn, they will say, 'I hope both of you have kids soon' because they like Dawn. When they see me hugging a woman they don't know, they get mad."

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jolynn.chia@asiaone.com