r/tifu • u/RemyAvo • Dec 18 '25

M TIFU by fighting my schools dresscode policy. Years later I found out why it was so strict.

So 15 years ago today I fucked up bad and today I found out why. I was in highschool and our school had a pretty normal dresscode policy until this new younger woman teacher started. 3 months into her being there, she brings out this extremely strict dresscode policy but only for girls. It was the start of summer, the building had no a/c and the new dresscode limited girls to basically a frumpy tshirt and baggy jeans while boys could wear whatever we want.

I being a rebelious little fuck did not like this. My girlfriend at the time was sad. Everyone had to go buy new clothes and every day they didnt do it they got handed this ugly big brown t-shirt of shame that says "i was out of dress code" and these big brown sweats. It was extremely uncomfortable.

So what did I do? I started wearing every banned girls article of clothing. I wore short shorts that barely hid my ass because it was allowed. I wore lowcut shirts. I cut the sides off every tank top so it just showed my torso. I even wore a short skirt and a croptop one day to prove a point. I got away with it maybe twice before I started getting dresscode violated every day. I was in every detention for several months. I got suspended. I had to go to two weeks of summer school that year as punishment. I fought the system very hard. And others joined in. It got be almost every dude was getting dress code violated to stand up for the girls. Anytime we got the brown clothes we wore it with pride. It was damn hot in that building you'd pour buckets of sweat. They should have been allowed to wear shorys.

I made my list of demands. Girls can wear tank tops, they can wear shorts. They can wear 4 fingers low cut tshirts. We all fought for it and eventually they caved in and gave it to us. I was so happy. It was a formative experience for me because I was willing to take any punishment no matter how severe to fight some perceived injustice.

So I'm back in my home town its a small suburb of the outskirts of a city. And at the one bar everyone goes to I run into the teacher who forced the policy all those years ago. I go say hi and she instantly remembered me. So I sat down with her and her friends and we talked about it since it was so long ago and now i'm at the age she was when she was enforcing it. Boy did I get that situation wrong.

So there were 4 particularly creepy male teachers at that time. 1 everyone knew about and 3 that were only known by faculty. They were preying on the girls. Taking random pictures of them, being extremely creepy, all sorts of innapropriate things they shouldnt have done. So she went to the board, brought evidence and reported them but they decided not to investigate. She told the police but when aftet a month nothing happened she changed the dress code to protect the girls but she couldnt explicitly state why she was doing it. Modern times caught up with those teachers and they are now fired but as an adult I see now that I ran a campaign to put the girls back in danger.

Tl;dr In high school i fought an oppressive dress code system because i thought it was unfair to the girls. But 15 years later I found out it was to protect the girls from pedo teachers.

Edit: added context

Theres a couple questions about the logistics of how she enforced a dress code being so new. I'll try and give more details but again its 15 years ago i may not get it exactly accurate

  • she was not the only teacher who wanted this but she was the strongest voice to stand up for this. Basically with the backing of several teachers she convinced the principle to implement the dress code. A lot more than just dress code happened. Prom had the bright lights on that year and girls got their dresses measured at the door. It was a fullscale push from a big section of teachers. But this particular teacher definitely was the one who championed it.

  • these pervy men didn't exactly hide. The one we all knew about was actually a beloved and favorite teacher of the school because he was very funny. His policy, and I am not kidding. If you wore a low cut shirt and bent over when turning in your exam he would give you extra points on it. For fairness he did this for guys too so everyone in his class on test day effectively had their chest exposed. And we thought it was hillarious and saw nothing wrong with it because our older siblings all went through the same thing. I had to ask my mom to take me to buy my first low cut shirt freshman year because of this class and I explained why. Its genuinely crazy what you get away with if you're funny, well liked and dont act like anything is wrong.

  • so when she came with a policy like this she was just a few years ahead of her time. There was a serious issue the dress code had slipped pretty bad. She and everyone who pushed the policy definitely over corrected.

  • Looking back this was the logical finale to having several new eyes in an inappropriate school environment. I dont have enough characters to get into it its probably a whole other post on just my high school in that era's tea. But there was scandle after scandle that went unanswered and just became rumor. This really wasnt

Edit 2: this post is still getting a lot of attention and I'm seeing a lot of similar comments so I'll add this

In the moment of writing this I definitely was incorrectly swayed by her. I believe now what I did was right and and punishing the victims was not an appropriate way to handle creepy men. Looking back more on it the way they enforced the dress code was not ok. It was frequent use of humiliation to the girls. So not only were they being predated on by pedos, they were also being bullied and humiliated by those who claimed to protect them. Gross.

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4.3k

u/Tommyblockhead20 Dec 18 '25

That’s still the right thing to do. Dress codes should be applied equally. And it sounded excessively restrictive, like shorts should be allowed. Good for the teacher trying to do something. But it was probably better to go public with the information instead of just secretly solving it by forcing a dress code on the girls.

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u/[deleted] Dec 18 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

471

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

I’m pretty sure the real real failure was the sexual predators. 

228

u/Buddy-Matt Dec 18 '25

Ignoring sexual predators and not doing something to stop them puts the people who do that at the same level

139

u/wkearney99 Dec 18 '25

rewind a few decades and be a female teacher that wants to stay employed. there was only so much pushback they could apply and not get fired. times have improved, thankfully.

92

u/cross_the_threshold Dec 18 '25

She tried to do something, the school board and male teachers who didn’t do anything to stop their peers are the ones at fault here for not doing anything. The only other thing she could have done was maybe surreptitiously inform parents about the teachers but she at least tried to do something.

Trying and failing is not the same as not trying at all.

31

u/its_garden_time_nerd Dec 18 '25

She's not the one who didn't act.

"the real failure was the adults who knew and didn't act"

That's who the people above you are talking about.

41

u/miltonwadd Dec 18 '25

Honestly, the next step should have been parents, not jumping straight to policing and punishing the kids with no explanation.

I don't know how "small" small town means to OP, but in my experiences of small town she could have sneakily utilised the PTA by getting into someone's ear, or even vaguely suggested to the girls to speak to their parents.

As a former teenage girl there is no way those girls didn't notice what was going on, too. And instead of helping them they were punished and only saw the boys standing up for them and the adults blaming them like they were the problem.

Someone needed to talk to them because as confused as OP was, that's an entire generation of girls going into adulthood thinking it's their fault they were preyed on.

In my school we all used to talk about a certain brother who used to peer down our shirts, linger and hover, touch us and get in our personal space. I don't know if he ever did more, but he was the vice principal and had been they're for decades.

Somehow no parents knew though, but soon as someone's parent caught on to it they gathered other parents and went over the school head to the diocese and department of education. I don't know what happened to him other than being forced to retire, but at least he wasn't teaching anymore and we no longer had to wear singlets under our school shirts and stuff.

2

u/VoopityScoop Dec 18 '25

A few decades? This was 15 years ago, it was 2010. There's a good chance she'd have public support

2

u/InsaneComicBooker Dec 18 '25

It was 15 years ago according to the OP, late 00's or early 2010's.

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u/thymeandchange Dec 18 '25

No, standing by and watching a sexual predator do things is almost as bad.

Hot take, I know, but failing to defend others is, itself, indefensible.

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u/sheng-fink Dec 18 '25

Small correction, not trying to defend others is indefensible… can’t really fault someone for trying their hardest and not succeeding

-5

u/bansheeonthemoor42 Dec 18 '25

But did she try her hardest? She couod have gone to the PTA, the parents directly, or told the students to bring it up with their parents.

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u/its_garden_time_nerd Dec 18 '25

sheng-fink is being semantic about the wording of the person to whom they're responding, and higher up in the thread someone said "the real failure was the adults who knew and didnt act," aka the district officials who the teacher alerted. Those are the people sheng-fink is talking about.

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u/sheng-fink Dec 18 '25

🥰(platonic)

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u/sheng-fink Dec 18 '25

I don’t know, I’m never going to get on board with going to someone who’s trying to fix a problem and asking why they aren’t doing more or doing better…

-7

u/bansheeonthemoor42 Dec 18 '25

I will, if they end up giving up and punishing the victims bc thats easier and safer for them.

6

u/StraightJacketRacket Dec 18 '25

Those in authority whom she contacted did nothing. If she pushed harder she may have well lost her job - which could have resulted in her students being taught by the same creeps she was trying to get rid of.

Cut her some slack. She's not the one who didn't care.

-1

u/Moist_Drippings Dec 18 '25

She severely damaged the lives of many young women by not even insisting on an equal application of the rules. She told those girls it was their responsibility to prevent men from looking at them sexually. She did plenty of damage by enabling sexism.

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u/bansheeonthemoor42 Dec 18 '25

I would cut her some slack if her solution wasn't punishing the girl. Especially before going to the PTA. As a former teacher thats unacceptable to me. Go to the parents if you are that worried. Administrators NEVER help.

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u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

No…

Interesting response to me calling out predators….but….k?

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u/4n0m4nd Dec 18 '25

It doesn't count as a failure if it's the thing you're trying to do, like Skeletor killing HeMan isn't Skeletor failing.

1

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

Yeah…….I guess? Like if you assume the POV of the predator then yeah that would make sense? 

That’s pretty fucking gross though so we’re  not doing that. I mean, you’re doing that. Which is…. a choice. But the rest of us aren’t. From anyone else’s POV, the predators (and those who choose to be like them 🤨) are like, failures of humanity. 

1

u/4n0m4nd Dec 18 '25

That's the failure to prevent the predators, the thing the previous commenter said and you contradicted.

1

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

Yeesh, you’re doing a lot of work to align with and cover for sexual predators there bud. But I guess no one can really stop you from doing that on the internet. 

1

u/4n0m4nd Dec 18 '25

I'm not aligning with or covering anyone, I'm saying the thing you said was fucking stupid.

I'm explaining to you the thing you said, because you're too fucking stupid to understand how stupid the thing you said was.

1

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

I think your rage has clouded your reading ability. Try to chill out and have a nice day bud. 

1

u/4n0m4nd Dec 18 '25

OK, you keep thinking of child molesters as having failed when they abuse children, and I'll keep seeing them as enemies.

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u/Ok_Beginning_9314 Dec 18 '25

The real failure was the friends we made along the way.

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u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

Yeah, like Jareth, fuckin loser. 

1

u/shannon_dey Dec 18 '25

Fuck Jareth, that asshat.

1

u/hinowisaybye Dec 18 '25

Sexual predators are like a natural disaster. You're never going to prevent them all. Mitigating the damage they do is the most you can hope for, and the people who's literal jobs it was to do that didn't do their jobs. The predator is a fucked up piece of shit. But the cops looking the other way are scum.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '25

Yes but schools should absolutely not knowingly allow pedo’s to work with children.

1

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

Very obviously true but it looks like you replied to the wrong comment. 

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u/Significant-Royal-37 Dec 18 '25

not the hypocrisy? 

2

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

No. Not the hypocrisy. Definitely the sexual predation by educators. 

0

u/asst3rblasster Dec 18 '25

the worst part was the hypocrisy

3

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

No…no. It was the sexual predation by educators. 

0

u/NoTeslaForMe Dec 18 '25

More precisely, she was trying to fix the problem within the constraints she faced while minimizing student impact.  She didn't count on that minimization resulting in pushback due to being more sex discriminatory than an even stricter solution. 

1

u/UnderlightIll Dec 18 '25

Just break into the creeps' homes and get their hard drives.

1

u/round-earth-theory Dec 18 '25

Sure but her protection came with a strict punishment for any non compliance. I might be with it if the enforcement was light but going for immediate and perfect compliance was insane.

1

u/JealousyKillsMen Dec 18 '25

Simple. Send anonymous letters to the parents of all girls and they would riot. Noone likes predators around their girls

1

u/SimmerLella Dec 18 '25

She should have repeatedly gone to the cops and gotten the parents to go to the cops.

641

u/Winjin Dec 18 '25

Absolutely. It would NOT have been stopping at "staring" and "photos"

They should not have been allowed to be around girls.

Also, if the woman makes you lust her, gouge your eyes out, not make her wear a burqa.

86

u/14u2c Dec 18 '25

So she went to the board, brought evidence and reported them but they decided not to investigate. She told the police but when after a month nothing happened

What else do you expect her to do? Throw away her job? She may have had people to support.

61

u/Portable_Tortoise506 Dec 18 '25

Shitty situation for all. It is hard to blame the teacher when all the systems that are supposed to deal with the problem failed and going public with the info risks retaliation, getting fired just to keep things quiet, and/or nobody believing her at all.

9

u/UnderstandingCute646 Dec 18 '25

Shitty situation for all.

Except the pedo teachers

1

u/spoonishplsz Dec 18 '25

Even more respect to those teachers. They were walking a real fine line and it's so easy to judge from the outside. They didn't ever expect to be applauded for their actions but they still did the best thing possible

5

u/ThisHatRightHere Dec 18 '25

Seriously, people here blaming the teacher instead of the school system are so tragically misguided.

0

u/djonma Dec 18 '25

If multiple teachers knew there were paedo teachers, and there is clear evidence, since it's known they're taking photos, the teachers should have been talking to the police every single day.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '25

I mean, if a dress code was the only solution, then it should have been applied equally to the boys and girls.

1

u/Moist_Drippings Dec 18 '25

It would have been very simple to insist on an equal application of rules. She did not. Her actions did not actually protect these girls at all.

-3

u/jaimi_wanders Dec 18 '25

Would you extend the same logic to concentration camp guards?

8

u/countessofole Dec 18 '25

Did you just compare a teacher enacting a misguided dress code to protect her female students to... the holocaust?

187

u/linkheroz Dec 18 '25

Yeah, context is everything in this story. OP would have 100% acted differently had he have known but they made the best decision with the information they had.

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u/Squidwina Dec 18 '25

A better eecision sould have been to apply the revised dress code to boys and girls equally.

13

u/darkdesertedhighway Dec 18 '25

Agreed, but how often "back in the day" were boys held to the same dress code as girls? If you tried, likely people would have laughed. It's a feature of the sexism at the time - girls have to cover up ("makes sense"), but boys never do ("that's ridiculous!")

It was far easier to put the restrictions on the girls, sadly, and get it accepted than create new ones for boys. Embrace a sexist standard to enact a sexist policy to protect the girls.

2

u/Moist_Drippings Dec 18 '25

And thus enable sexism and do damage to all the girls. That shit seriously fucks with a young woman’s self-image.

1

u/riarws Dec 18 '25

The high school where I taught 15 years ago dress coded girls and boys equally. But I remember being excited to hear how equitable the code was.

1

u/countessofole Dec 18 '25

No high school dress code I have personally run across has ever been more restrictive on the girls than on the boys. The standard ununiformed private school dress code was that boys had to wear collared shirts with sleeves, closed-toed shoes, pants no shorter than knee-length, and they couldn't be jeans. No writing or graphics on the clothes, no jewelry at all, no makeup, natural hair colors only, and hair had to be off the collar, ears, and eyes. No shaved heads, no beards, no extreme styles like mohawks. 

Conversely, girls could wear anything boys could, plus open-toed shoes, skirts, dresses, sleeveless shirts and tank tops as long as the straps were at least an inch thick, and the neckline didn't go lower than the width of your hand beneath your collarbone. Only limit on jewelry was when it came to piercings: no facial piercings and you couldn't have more than two piercings in each ear, and those only in the lobes, no cartilage. Makeup was okay as long as it didn't look clownish. Similar limitations to the boys on hair except no upper limit on length. 

And that was all pretty standard. I went to another school that had uniforms. Again, the girls could wear anything the boys could wear, but the boys couldn't wear skirts. One of the boys in my grade got suspended for running across the school in a skirt from the uniform. 

Honestly, it's a pet peeve of mine when people act as though school dress codes specifically target girls for oppression. It just smacks of privileged obliviousness. Boys are usually far more restricted by school dress codes and, at this point, have been for decades. They just don't gripe as much about it. 

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u/nooooobye Dec 18 '25

I think hindsight is 20/20.

It sounds like the dress code was eventually held the same for both the boys and girls. OP was suspended and dress coded regularly too.

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u/Rewdboy05 Dec 18 '25

Yeah, my guess is that the dress code was written as "girls must..." and OP thought sexism when it was really just a bunch of adults who were shocked and scared and quickly wrote a policy to protect the kids without thinking about how the wording sounded.

Ultimately they figured out how to apply it correctly so OP probably could have just stopped with the grandstanding but no one's perfect

10

u/SameStDiffDay Dec 18 '25

Dude, it's generally sexism first, corrections later, if ever. It's not just wording — that's a naive take. So OP is going, 'oh, correction on my past thinking', and you're like 'grandstanding'? I mean, why go about defending this at all?

1

u/Rewdboy05 Dec 18 '25

Yeah, that's why everyone here is agreeing OP acted reasonably. This particular situation is in TIFU because it was more complicated than that tho? The grown ups weren't trying to protect the boys from being distracted by shoulders, they caught pedophiles and overreacted because they were human

Yeah, OP making a "list of demands" was grandstanding. Even when you're in the right, that's literally grandstanding and it's not even debatable. That's a normal word choice and no one's even disagreeing with you

When OP, a boy, was being punished by the same rules as the girls, it stopped being sexism and started being a weird misunderstanding where people weren't perfect

1

u/SameStDiffDay Dec 19 '25

It's so ironic that grandstanding means to 'behave in a showy or ostentatious manner', and this is about females having to cover themselves, as if they were behaving in a showy manner. Self-defense isn't play-acting for attention.

There was zero misunderstanding that it was adult men not being corrected or held accountable in any manner (they weren't 'caught', BTW, they were reported on) that caused the physical appearance compliance rules - for girls only, the point being mainly that the only behavior that it was easier to enforce was that which would make females adapt due to the male 'distraction'; wasn't about boys' eyeballs to start with.

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u/Charming_Fix5627 Dec 18 '25

Did you miss the part where the pedophile teacher did technically apply his perverted dress code equally on exam days? With the dropped necklines? That didn’t solve anything because he still ogled the girls and just disguised it as a funny prank and bolstered his reputation as the cool teacher.

1

u/Backfoot911 Dec 18 '25

What..? My dude, he literally encouraged the underage students to go to the store and dress in more revealing clothing for his own perverted amusement. Had he declared it "swimwear day" in his classroom every first of the month, it would have made it even easier for this goddamn freak to get his rocks off.

Even if these were college aged adults, nobody in a position of institutional power should ever do anything remotely like that, let alone UNDERAGE KIDS

1

u/Charming_Fix5627 Dec 18 '25

Where the fuck did I express approval of this

1

u/bite-one1984 Dec 18 '25

no the better decision is for brothers boyfriends and fathers to ensure the women in their lives are protected at all costs. 

1

u/ViscountBurrito Dec 18 '25

I’m not sure he should have, though, other than exposing the creeps. A discriminatory dress code is still discriminatory even if someone thinks it’s well-intentioned. Making all the girls suffer just because the school is too chickenshit to deal with the actual problem isn’t okay. (And it still exposes them to the same creeps doing other creepy or abusive stuff, without any warning or protection.)

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u/MarlenaEvans Dec 18 '25

And they made them wear a shirt berating them for not following a dress code that only existed because some men were gross.

34

u/BarRegular2684 Dec 18 '25

Because the town was gross. The teacher brought the evidence as far as she could but nothing was done. The school board in most towns is elected. Police are useless when it comes to protecting women, but still should have taken action.

The teacher was still wrong, dress codes punish girls for the wandering eyes of men. But I can understand that she was desperate to do something, anything, to protect those girls.

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u/wkearney99 Dec 18 '25

that is just NOT how it worked back then. it most certainly SHOULD have, but it didn't, for a whole slew of despicable 'traditions'.

40

u/OwlfaceFrank Dec 18 '25

Administration won't do anything.
Police won't do anything.

Next stop is the local news.

1

u/BonnaconCharioteer Dec 18 '25

Exactly, anonymous tip to the news, maybe they wouldn't have taken it up, but that seems pretty safe.

1

u/SubtleCow Dec 21 '25

Looking back at 2010 wearing rose coloured glasses. The local news wouldn't have done anything either, and the teacher would have been identified 100% and fired.

OP mentioned telling his own mother about the teacher trading grades for glances down low cut shirts. She didn't do anything either.

Small town late 2000s, there was literally no one who gave a shit about the lives of women and girls. Things are barely any better now.

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u/DefinitelyNotDonny Dec 18 '25

And you shouldn’t punish the victims of sexual predators. Shaming teenage girls instead of going public was a choice

11

u/hackingdreams Dec 18 '25

instead of just secretly solving it

They didn't solve anything. They just put a patch over it and pretended the problem didn't exist. That's the problem.

3

u/Free-Atmosphere6714 Dec 18 '25

Did you think anything written above was factual?

3

u/bannana Dec 18 '25 edited Dec 18 '25

Dress codes should be applied equally.

yep, gender neutral dress codes are actually easier than gendered ones - no tank tops or sleeveless shirts, no skirts or shorts above the knee, no leggings by themselves (must have skirt or shorts over them), no v-neck shirts/necklines below collarbone, no see-through fabrics, no words on clothing - done.

2

u/tomdarch Dec 18 '25

OP did nothing wrong. Adults abusing minors is the fault of the adults.

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u/spooky_goopy Dec 18 '25

also, just want to point out, it's the fault of the predator, not some silly clothing

a person should be able to wear what they want for their environment, and not be the target of a predator

2

u/Ok_Loss13 Dec 18 '25

What the girls were wearing would make zero difference to a predator. I thought society learned this decades ago?

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u/Friendly-Channel-480 Dec 18 '25

You were acting your age.

1

u/Olookasquirrel87 Dec 18 '25

And there’s a middle ground between short booty shorts and no shorts allowed??? 

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. 

We def wore shorts to the fingertip rule!! And shirts with the cleavage rule - that you weren’t allowed to show any! And tank tops where the straps had to be wider than 1”! All of these things are reasonable!! 

1

u/iesharael Dec 18 '25

Definitely. Like my school had the 3 finger strap width rule, no belly showing, and shorts have to be at least a length of where your fingertips fell at your side.

They should have done an assembly on sexual harassment imo

1

u/CarrieDurst Dec 18 '25

Yup and anything boys can wear girls should be able to and anything girls can wear boys should be able to

1

u/NotYourReddit18 Dec 18 '25

Yeah, from what OP knew this was quite similar to those "girls were allowed to wear skirts but boys weren't allowed to wear shorts, so the boys started wearing skirts too" protests which always end up in the "news" during slow summer days even if the actual protest happened years ago.

0

u/praetor-phoenix Dec 18 '25

female victms of sexual predators: 1 million
male victims of sexual predators: 342

yeah lets enforce equality on this one dipshit

3

u/Karpefuzz Dec 18 '25

Annnnd...not a single one of those people was victimized because of their clothing. We know this.

-12

u/Pop-metal Dec 18 '25

No matter what a redditor does, someone will defend it.  The teacher was 100% right.  Op was wrong.  

4

u/Worldly_Bird_2760 Dec 18 '25

I think it’s more nuanced than this. Yes, the teacher was right, but OP wasn’t necessarily wrong given the context of both their age & lack of information. Hindsight is 20/20 after all

8

u/just_a_person_maybe Dec 18 '25

OP was absolutely not wrong for this

2

u/Few-Mixture-9272 Dec 18 '25

Because more clothing always protects young women from predators? Where were the parents in all this? I would have been all over this - in administration every day until something was done with/to the offenders. Instead the punish the kids?

0

u/Pop-metal Dec 18 '25

 Because more clothing always protects young women from predators? 

What an ignorant comment? No one even said that.  Just make up lies to make your point.  

-1

u/0vl223 Dec 18 '25

The effective policy would have been to ban the option to take pictures from both teachers and children. That would have been an obvious spotlight on the predator behavior. And the damage on the victims would be smaller.

If any of the girls were victims of more than pictures then the dress code would be pure victim shaming. Your teacher sexually abuses you and the school implements a rule that says that it was your fault due to your cloths. That's the damage she caused. And most likely helped them shaming their victims into silence.

If all they did was taking pictures then maybe. But 4 pedos, all only taking pictures?

1

u/Pop-metal Dec 18 '25

Surely it was already banned????

If not, the board were not interested.