Rape culture is pervasive everywhere and places like Davidson College are by no means exempt from this. Davidson College is not only known for its high academics, but as an environment that highly values trust and honor among its community members. With this in mind, many individuals assume that aspects of rape culture are not prevalent on campus, however, these practices and behaviors not only manifest themselves within the campus’s culture, but occurrences of them and their impacts are often silenced. In turn, keeping people’s stories and experiences quiet or “under the radar” only reinforces rape culture and feeds into upholding it. On Davidson’s campus, there have been a few attempts to bring these stories to light and expose how rape culture is much more prevalent than individuals initially assume. However, many of these efforts were not effective long-term or did not make a large enough impact to change the overall perception of Davidson College’s culture. 

There are many strategies used to fight against the normalization of rape culture everywhere that I believe would be just as successful if implemented on a smaller scale such as the Davidson College campus. For example, one of Aristotle’s epideictic forms of rhetoric, megethos, was and still is utilized as a central part of #MeToo’s movement in the arrangement of a feminist list, exposing a profuse amount of stories shared by survivors. This method, emphasized by Stephanie R. Larson in her book What It Feels Like, is meant to “‘not only to engage viewers, but also to overwhelm them’ … with feelings that encourage a level of belief in victims’ testimonies and a commonplace reality of rape culture” (Larson 138). Just from the sheer number of accounts, this tactic is very useful in the way that it represents how large-scale rape culture is and how many people, particularly women, it negatively effects. To implement this strategy on campus, I propose doing a paper campaign throughout campus displaying anonymous stories related to rape culture from survivors within the Davidson community. Realizing that these papers can be a trigger for some individuals, there would be an additional paper on top of these stores with a content warning. So, while these papers are sharing the stories of survivors and making the magnitude of rape culture’s impacts known, they are also enacting active consent. To fund this project, I want to apply for the Stories Yet To Be Told grant, which specifically focuses on sharing people’s stories and transforming sites into places of engagement. 

By initiating this paper campaign and using the rhetorical tactic of megethos, light can be shed on how rape culture is prevalent everywhere, even on Davidson College’s campus. The high number of papers with different stories on them will hopefully make the magnitude of stories alarmingly clear and expose the extent rape culture impacts those around us. In addition to this, it will also provide an opportunity for survivors to share their stories, even if it is anonymous, giving their stories the power to bring awareness to the community and inspire change. 

Larson, Stephanie L. What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021.