I have been so shocked and saddened following this story, because of the framing.

Every news account that I have read has either explicitly or implicitly made the story more about "sex by deception" then about a brutal, unjustified assault on a teenage girl who must have been scared out of her mind during the initial live stream, and later probably horrified to realize it had been live streamed.

Every story I've read has contained a detailed discussion of "sex by deception," as if that ought to matter here.

I'm reminded of a very popular book that came out in the early 2000s. I don't remember the title anymore, but it was kind of shock-jock stuff for "dudes," for "bros" who like to think of themselves as super smart and pretty open-minded, but traditionally, toxically male.

One of the chapters was titled something like, "Player? You've slept with a dude!"

The premise of the chapter was that transgender women are common enough that any man who has frequent casual sex has probably had sex with a transgender woman without realizing it.

The title of the chapter and a lot of the ways the author expressed himself were dehumanizing and demeaning to trans people, but with one major difference from how things are being talked about today.

The author's first priority was obviously to shock and entertain his audience through titillation. But there was one redeeming part of that chapter. He basically told his bro pals to get over themselves if they were horrified at the possibility of sleeping with a transgender woman.

If you can't tell the difference, he asked, what the hell do you care? Player, you're obviously not having sex with 30 women a month so you can find the love of your life and raise a family with her. Chill out. It's just sex, bro. You'll be okay.

There's a whole hell of a lot to unpack there, and a lot of it very much ungood, but at the heart of his sexist ideas he at least injected some sense, telling guys they don't have anything to feel shame over.

And that reminds me of the two summers I was 17 and 18 years old and in San Diego for Marine Corps training. As a callow, sheltered Iowa boy, I had rarely seen any porn outside tattered Playboy or Hustler magazines passed down from older guys.

But outside Marine Corps camps, you'll see lots of cheap fast food restaurants, sex motels that charge by the hour, and porn shops. Tons of porn shops.

The funny thing about those shops is that they always featured a gay section with magazines available for leafing through. I desperately wanted to leaf, but I also desperately wanted nobody to know I was gay, so I usually avoided those sections other than walking through that aisle 'by mistake' and pretending not to look.

Another thing about those shops is that they invariably featured a dedicated section of magazines featuring women with huge breasts and huge penises. That is of course not how those magazines actually labeled the content.

I don't know why, and I've thought about it to this day, but you'd hardly ever see anybody leafing through the gay section, because I suppose people were just too afraid. But through that other section? The one with the insulting name for trans women? I used to see plenty of Marines leafing through those magazines! Is it possible they felt less shame looking at that material then looking at strictly gay material? I suspect so!

So where is all the shame coming from, the kind that drove these teenagers to physically attack and potentially almost kill a 16-year-old transgender girl?

Well, I don't think we need to speculate too much about that. You've already named some of the major culprits. The same ones writing the stories that focus so much on sex by "deception."