More women than men are vegetarian — if you consider the word “vegetarian” to mean someone who eats no meat, milk, or eggs & wears no leather, as in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, something like 4 out of 5 vegetarians in the U.S. are female.

If I were planning to write an essay about the moral or philosophical virtues of eating vegetables, I might approach this statistic with claims like Charles Foster’s from Being a Beast:

Women have more theory of mind than men, which makes them nicer people — less prone to start wars or engage in egocentric monologues at the dinner table.

Foster goes on to say that in his experience, empathy, trying to imagine what life must be like for individuals of other species, changed his diet. He knows, of course, that humans evolved to be carnivorous. This evolutionary history is readily apparent in our minds and bodies. We experience the thrill of the hunt (not the fear of the hunted), our intestines are short, our cells can’t synthesize all the nutrients they need. Foster carries genes that “want” him to be a hunter, and he writes:

I’ve put down my guns and taken up my tofu, but there was a time when I crept heavily armed through the woods and over the mountains.

By hunting, he could more fully embrace what it meant to be born a Homo sapiens. And yet. Once he made a serious effort to understand what his choices meant for other creatures, once he’d lived as a badger, and concluded that badgers, too, must have their sorrows and joys, their own reasons for wanting to be alive, he could no longer support their murder. And if not badgers, why cows?

Later in his project, Foster writes of a moment — while he was trying to live as an otter, swimming underwater and hunting raw fish with his hands — when a fish swam into his mouth. In that moment of truth, he chose not to eat it:

A disoriented stickleback, no doubt taking my open mouth for a cave, swam inside. Its fluttering spines grazed my palate like the probe of a Parkinsonian dentist. I should have crushed it between my fillings and swallowed it. I couldn’t, any more than I could stamp on a mouse. My failure is illogical: I pay good money for other people to winch cows bellowing to their deaths so that we can serve up buttock muscle for Sunday lunch. My illogicality isn’t original, of course, which perhaps makes it worse, and certainly makes it less interesting. It’s about distance; about vicarious guilt being less intense; about the little physiological details of death that speak more intimately to our moral intuitions than any amount of argument; about the fact that physical proximity connotes relationship, even with a very basic animal, and that almost any sort of relationship makes it harder to kill.

As Foster’s empathy developed during the project, he felt that he had developed a meaningful relationship with all animals. Their minds are all similar to his own. He could not support their murder for his sake.

But — importantly — Foster does not impugn the otters. An otter would crush and swallow the fish. They do so ceaselessly; otters sleep some eighteen hours a day, but for their waking six they are frenetic killing machines.

Otters, like humans, are heterotrophs. We must eat to survive. And empathy is a consideration that the feelings of others, like our own, have value. You can’t properly value someone else’s life without valuing your own.

Maybe otters would rather give up the hunt, laze about during the day and take a twice-weekly trip to the grocery to buy tofu. But they don’t get that choice.

And so, if I wanted to claim that the decision to be vegetarian, for most people, springs from well-reasoned philosophical or moral beliefs, that is how I would explain the gender split. I would claim that women are more able to empathize with other species than men. Foster does. So does the Huffington Post article I pulled the numbers from.

But more likely, I feel, is that women are more pressured to consider the food they put into their bodies. In Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth she writes that

Some women’s magazines report that 60 percent of American women have serious trouble eating. The majority of middle-class women in the United States, it appears, suffer a version of anorexia or bulimia; but if anorexia is defined as a compulsive fear of and fixation upon food, perhaps most Western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics.

Dieting is the essence of contemporary femininity. Denying oneself food is seen as good in a woman, bad in a man. Where the feminine woman of the Feminine Mystique denied herself gratification in the world, the current successful and “mature” model of femininity submits to a life of self-denial in her body.

To eschew meat is a form of self-denial, and self-denial (in many contexts, but especially at the dinner table) is praised in women. A good woman, it was believed, gives up her dreams of a career for the sake of her family. A good woman, it is often still believed, gives up her dessert for the sake of her figure.

Not that dessert — or meat, for that matter — is a comparable sacrifice to a career. But all the abnegations add up. Women are routinely asked to do more with less. “Hunger hurts but starving works,” sings Fiona Apple.

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian speaks to the ways that a misogynistic society curtails the opportunities of women. The book uses the same structure as Knut Faldbakken’s Adam’s Diary: we examine a culture by observing the way three separate narrators relate to an unknowable woman. In The Vegetarian, the central woman has renounced meat as a step toward renouncing personhood. She reflects Yi Sang’s self-negating idea, “I believe that humans should be plants.”  She states that her decision was motivated by a nightmare, yet her dream closely mirrors a nightmare from William Burroughs’s Queer:

“Another dream I had a chlorophyll habit. Me and five other chlorophyll addicts are waiting to score. We turn green and we can’t kick the chlorophyll habit. One shot and you are hung for life. We are turning into plants.”

The central woman of Han’s The Vegetarian strives to become a tree. She experiences arousal only when her body is painted with flowers and leaves. She practices handstands and imagines how it would feel for her fingers to extend root-like into the soil, her legs the boughs of a tree. And she announces to her sister, who had brought her fruit to eat, “I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” Later, as she is dying of anorexia, she screams at the hospital staff, “I . . . don’t . . . like . . . eating!”

The story is less about a woman who wants to be vegetarian, than one who wants to be a vegetable. Which is perhaps a more important story to tell. We should not be proud of a culture in which people feel so trapped they no longer want to be human. Being alive should be a joy, and yet, as depicted in the final panels of Stuart McMillen’s Rat Park, we’ve created a world in which many feel their lives to be a cage.