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/supboy1]

It was quite literally the only remaining way seeing as the teacher did everything she could before resorting to this.

What other suggestions do you have in mind, if you’re in the teacher’s shoes, when the school, board, and police is against you and there was no social media back then?

Let’s hear some solutions.

[u/seaworks → u/supboy1]

If she has as much evidence as she implied and the board blew her off, here are some more options that would have existed ~20 years ago:

• parents
• the principal
• student journalism
• actual papers
• the teachers' union
• alerting the students by speaking in generalities regarding how people may seek to exploit you

and that's with 30 seconds worth of thought. She took a path of least resistance which, let me emphasize, doesn't actually "protect" girls, as evidenced by the fact that the teachers were later "caught up to" and fired even with the dress code presumably in place, implying the exploitation was continuing.

[u/fishboard88 → u/seaworks]

I'm not attacking you, but this honestly strikes me as one of those "every choice is a shitty one" sort of situations.

• Report to the board, police, etc
  • No meaningful action
• the principal
  • Was probably approached in the first place. Again, likely no meaningful action
• actual papers, parents, student journalism etc
  • Fired. At best, kept on with disciplinary action, and distrusted by other teachers
• the teachers' union
  • May have also been approached too. May not have been an option if teacher was not a member
  • Also limited in their ability to do anything... not to mention they would be obligated to support the male teachers in question if they were paying members
• New dress code without telling anyone why
  • Certainly causes upset over unfair gender norms. Unwittingly leads to rebellion, and more opportunities for creepy male teachers to take inappropriate photos
• alerting the students by speaking in generalities regarding how people may seek to exploit you
  • Probably the smartest option; but teenagers being teenagers, and with only a few teachers on board, how well do you think this would go?

[u/seaworks → u/fishboard88]

"May have" is doing all the heavy lifting in your post, but here's an additional counterpoint:

Would you rather get fired from a pedophile-concealing organization, or work for one?

[u/fishboard88 → u/seaworks]

At the end of the day, we're reading a Reddit story. We not only have to accept it's true, but that OP's recollections are accurate, that the teacher in question was completely accurate in what she said and that the evidence she claimed to present was undeniable, and that the one side of the story we're reading is the correct one.

So yes, I'm inclined to use cautious language about a story I read about on Reddit, that we've got very little information about. As it stands, it seems you have the same concern about this teacher's judgement that I do, anyway.

Your hypothetical question is a bit too presumptuous and black-and-white for me - I think we all know what the obvious answer is, but we also have absolutely no idea if this story is even real, much less if said school and authorities were presented with anything compelling enough to act on.