Seven Brakes
Every harmful act starts as an impulse in one person. That impulse isn't nature: it's learned, from patriarchy, conquest, race, the market and the scripts around him. Then it has to push out through seven brakes, from his own conscience to the law. Pick an act, release the impulse, and see which brakes our culture has built and which it has switched off. Then change who is harmed, or restore a brake and try again.
Brake states are an illustrative teaching model built from the Language & Meaning timeline, not measured data; the coding is open to revision by survivors and sex workers. Brakes adapted from Bandura, "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities," 1999, and Finkelhor's preconditions model, 1984. Sources: marital rape exemptions ended in all 50 US states by 1993; Shotland & Straw, 1976; Koss, Gidycz & Wisniewski, 1987; Edwards, Bradshaw & Hinsz, 2014; Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 1990; Smith & Freyd, 2014; Pheterson, 1996; Philadelphia "theft of services" ruling, 2007; FOSTA-SESTA, 2018; TAKE IT DOWN Act, 2025; Brodsky, "Rape-Adjacent," Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 2017; California AB 453, 2021; DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1998; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 1990; Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1981; Fabiano et al., 2003. Where the impulse comes from: Sanday, "The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape," 1981; Gagnon & Simon, Sexual Conduct, 1973; Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986; Smith, Conquest, 2005; Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 2015; Lugones, 2007; Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004; Kimmel, Guyland, 2008; Blunt & Stardust, 2021. Drunk driving: Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 1980; Ad Council, "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk," 1983; National Minimum Drinking Age Act, 1984; designated-driver campaign, 1988; NHTSA FARS (verify current figures). Soleil Merroir, LCSW · cyborgdreamz