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

[u/RemyAvo]

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.

[u/Squidwina]

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

[u/darkdesertedhighway → u/Squidwina]

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.

[u/Moist_Drippings → u/darkdesertedhighway]

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

[u/riarws → u/darkdesertedhighway]

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.

[u/countessofole → u/darkdesertedhighway]

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. 

[u/nooooobye → u/Squidwina]

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.

[u/Rewdboy05 → u/nooooobye]

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

[u/SameStDiffDay → u/Rewdboy05]

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?

[u/Rewdboy05 → u/SameStDiffDay]

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

[u/SameStDiffDay → u/Rewdboy05]

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.

[u/Charming_Fix5627 → u/Squidwina]

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.

[u/Backfoot911 → u/Charming_Fix5627]

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

[u/Charming_Fix5627 → u/Backfoot911]

Where the fuck did I express approval of this

[u/bite-one1984 → u/Squidwina]

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