In advance of the trade summit set to take place in City X, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement of terms in the form of “Four Nos”: a list of non-negotiable rules and standards they would adhere by in their relations with those they deemed hostile towards their nation. Such a believable statement could be applied to any nation. In recent years, not only have Vietnam[1] and China[2] released their own Four Nos statements determining the terms and conditions of interactions with others, the South Korean women’s movement has released a statement of its own Four Nos which has since been adopted in China and is gaining notoriety among the next generation of the American women’s movement.
In a fraught international relations climate of increasing arms build-up and economic coercion, after having absorbed information on strategies and tactics that the powerless and the powerful have used for aggression or self-protection, a group of anonymous, online South Korean feminists created their own foreign policy in dealing with male violence and aggression which was cheekily called the Four Nos (aka 4B): No love, no sex, no marriage, and no children. Later, this expanded into the Six Nos and the Four Rejections (aka 6B4T) with the addition of: No consumption of products created by misogynistic corporations, “Nos” help “Nos”[3], reject the corset, reject religion, reject idol culture, and reject otaku culture. The originator of the policy is unknown.
The present-day online women’s movement which began in South Korea in response to their society’s own particular women’s issues is outlined in the 2023 book by Hawon Jung, Flowers of Fire. South Korean feminism tackles issues which are well known to liberal feminism (the feminism of high-income economies) such as: shortened career paths for women, the double or triple family contribution requirement required by women in their home life (corvée labor required by their natal family, their husband and children, and their husband’s parents), restrictive clothing and makeup standards which impose an undue burden of time and money on women, and the treatment of women as a source of non-reciprocal on-command companionship. However, the movement there has also continued to grapple with the root issues which are associated with radical feminism: rape, sexual assault, incest, reproductive coercion, and physical violence towards women, both domestic violence in the home and the threat or actual reality of violence on the street or in the workplace. It also dealt with the Asia-specific phenomenon of sex-selective abortion that led to many countries having more males than females. Which is to say, it tackles both women’s lower socioeconomic position in society as well as their increased vulnerability to physical violence by men.
Flowers of Fire covers a fifteen-to-twenty-year history of South Korean feminist activism, demonstrating the legal rights that women have gained in the last decades. The advent of online forums and micro-cameras made it possible for men to anonymously share spy camera videos they took of strangers, primarily of women. Because this was a new phenomenon, there were no legal protections in place, and women successfully advocated to have laws put in place to protect them from being preyed upon in this way and to punish violators. A successful woman prosecutor kicked off a swathe of denunciations against older men in powerful positions when she posted a detailed description of how she was continuously sexually harassed while on the job. Eventually, this led to a gradual re-assessment of South Korean militaristic office culture, which often required aggressive after-work socializing if one wanted to climb the ladder.[4]
It was in this backdrop that the novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was released, in 2016. This sparse novel written by Cho Nam-Joo tracks the life of a modern young everywoman. Her mother, the representative of the prior generation who made Korea's economic miracle happen, sacrificed all of herself to her family while getting very little in return. Kim Jiyoung is raised in a far more privileged position than her mother, yet she sees the doors of her future shut after she has a child and is forced out of the work force. Although she has a university degree and white-collar work background, she discovers that, as a woman with a young child, one of the best options available to her is working part-time in a shop. At the same time, she notices that having a child has not impacted her husband’s career prospects and life as sharply as it has impacted hers. In the tradition of The Yellow Wallpaper[5], the work ends with the protagonist driven into madness. This work resonated strongly with almost all young women across East Asia, and it was a bestseller well beyond just South Korea.
Still from the film adaptation
A few years later, the online movement known as 4B / 6B4T appeared. Radical female separatism was a branch of the American 1970s feminist movement[6] that was largely left behind as an extremist outlier, but it found new life in South Korean and Chinese internet forums. This movement has been re-imported back into the United States (ironically, despite 6B4T-related content and topics being banned on Douban in China,[7] the movement has largely entered the United States by way of Tik Tok). In the US, it has found greater resonance now that the corporatized liberal feminism of the early 2000s is being reassessed with suspicion, after having failed to deliver tangible gains to women, and in fact having resulted in a worsened position for women in society, both legally and socially.
But how could such an extreme (and many would claim unrealistic) formulation of the women’s movement as 4B have gained so many serious supporters and proponents? First of all, it takes advantage of women’s tendency to sacrifice their own interests for the group. It is a pacifist policy of the oppressed and victimized for the purposes of self-protection, rather than an aggressive policy of bartering access to women for the purpose of gaining small concessions.[8] 4B’s policy recollects similar policies in place in women’s domestic violence shelters, which are placed in hidden locations and from which women are banned from contacting their abusers for their own protection. Clearly, this is a strategy created by and for victims (and every woman is a potential victim) of societies in which male violence is minimized and denied, accepted as a matter of course, rather than bravely faced head on and dealt with.
It is also an online movement, taking place in text, rather than one in which people are organizing visible protest actions. It is not a Lysistrata-esque sex strike for the purpose of gaining a specific concession. Instead, it’s a siege on male violence in general, with the goal of ending male violence once and for all. The framing of 4B exposes the fundamentally flawed logic of androcentric society: in order for a woman’s safety to be guaranteed, she must ally herself with a man. But 4B invites the question: what is endangering her in the first place? Males. Most simply stated, a central position of 4B is that “不婚不育保平安” avoiding marriage and birth can protect women’s peace and safety.
Though the 6B4T movement can be considered extreme, it is not entirely unreasonable or impossible. While it has been common for men to develop formally organized social groups which allow only males (Spartan barracks for male soldiers, theater groups which allowed only male actors, nearly every government until the last century, etc.), female-only societies are largely mythical (the Amazons). Male separatist movements are so far from unusual that they are in fact, taken as the norm, but the idea of a female separatist movement is still something novel.
The growing acceptance of the online female separatist movement known as 6B4T reflects the increase of women’s social power, and a necessary correction for centuries in which men determined when women were allowed into their company, but women did not hold the same power to reject men from their society. The harem, though made up of women, was not created by women or controlled by them. In the economically prosperous rule-of-law societies of East Asia and Euro-America, such movements are an important step in rejecting the status quo of male violence, of societies in which we simply accept that it is an unchangeable fact that men are dangerous.[9] If we hold such a belief, then wars will be endless, prisons will be overflowing, and there is no hope for the future. 6B4T puts the onus back on men to correct the problem of male violence.[10] It is setting out the terms of negotiation in response to this age-old problem.
[1] No military alliances, no picking sides in a conflict, no foreign military bases in Vietnam, no use of force or threats of force
[2] In response to a prospective South Korean partnership: No compromising Chinese core interests, no pro-US or pro-Japan policy, no diplomatic tension, no taking the lead with North Korea
[3] There is a big debate over how this is translated: Cheng, Xiaoyi. (2023) 6B4T in China: a case of Inter-Asian feminist knowledge negotiation and contestation through translation, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 10:2, 125-140, DOI: 10.1080/23306343.2023.2241126.
[4] “Power Harassment” is the South Korean term for the practice of those in positions of superiority wielding their power against their inferiors indiscriminately and without fear of consequences.
[5] Early feminist novel (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which a woman becomes “hysterical” in response to the prison-like environment of domestic life.
[6] For example, Cell 16, a group known for advocating female celibacy and martial arts training, active in the early 1970s, which released a series of publications under the title “No More Fun and Games”
[7] The ban on 6B4T in China is interesting for a few reasons. While South Korea used the formulation 4B which is analogous to modern foreign policy formulations, the term “6B4T movement” in Chinese recalls the “6/4 Movement” known in English as the Tiananmen Square Incident.
[8] The practice of women exploiting their own sexuality to extract gains in the here-and-now, commonly argued to be empowering in the early 2000s, but now largely discarded.
[9] Most murderers are male. Why is this a fact that we must take as natural and not socially created?
[10] “…men come to me or to other feminists and say: “What you’re saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.”
And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in a public arena saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.”
Excerpt from Andrea Dworkin, “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape”
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