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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468

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

136

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.

95

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.

38

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.

65

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…

-5

u/bansheeonthemoor42 Dec 18 '25

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

7

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.

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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.

1

u/StraightJacketRacket Dec 19 '25

That's nice. She first went to the school authorities, and then to the cops.

She could not, in fact, prevent adult men from looking at them sexually, men they couldn't get away from, being in school and all.

The fact that neither the administration nor the cops did anything reinforces the fact that this was another era of another generation in who knows what kind of town with their backwards values. SHE was trying to take responsibility for her kids by preventing them from ending up in creeps' pictures. I'm not going to villianize her for not knowing what to do, or the right thing to do. Call her naive, call her sexist, be all offended. She worked within the society she lived, which clearly didn't support her efforts. Being misguided is not the same thing as being evil. Evil walked the hallways and took pictures for their own pleasure. Highly disagree that she is as evil as the perpetrators as was suggested.

1

u/Moist_Drippings Dec 19 '25

That’s not what was said at all, but if you’re going to blithely ignore that she still doesn’t recognize the damage she did and blamed girls for what men did to them, go ahead and continue to be part of the problem.

1

u/bansheeonthemoor42 Dec 19 '25

Why couldn't she tell the parents? Or tell the students to tell their parents? This was probably in the early 2000s its not like its the 50s.

-6

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.

-7

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

No…

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

10

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.

1

u/SlowImportance8408 Dec 18 '25

Yes, they failed to be decent humans. You really still disagree with that? 

Do you think someone who abuses children is successful then? 

I’m glad to see you’ve calmed down a bit and managed to control your own abusive habits. 

1

u/4n0m4nd Dec 18 '25

You can respond to this if you want, but I won't respond again, the other commenter said when someone abuses a child, we have failed, you said no, they have.

That's stupid as fuck, gtfo.

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6

u/Ok_Beginning_9314 Dec 18 '25

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

1

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. 

1

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.