>I am looking for opinions here. (Facts welcome too of course)
>
>I have noticed that virtually every vegetarian I know, whose personal past
>I know a bit about, each of them has been somehow victimized. One woman
>was beaten by her husband for a number of years before she left him,
>another was extremely bullied by a sibling for his entire childhood,
>another was molested by her father, another was raped as a teenager, and
>I too could be put into this category of vegetarians (I was a vegetarian
>for 6 years, until recently.)
>
>I am wondering, if you could take a poll among vegetarians would you find
>that a great many have been victimized, and if you wanted to get all
>Freudian about it, would you find that this has anything to do with their
>decision to be vegetarian?

i can share my expereience .

i bought into the idea of vegetarianisme for all the reasons  That are
generally presented( health , thirld world issues ,non violence , less
environment impact , low cost etc..)

But mostly it started with my wish to "be " a victim of bigger
stronger
peoples .
i felt early on compassion for animals and when i got teen ager i
started to
rebel against the vilains ( specially my older sister husband a
military
tough guy who loved to correct his children with his belt and loved to
tease
my sensibility.)
I projected my own feeling of being a victim and being stuck in that
position on the animals

i was scared of death at the same time that somewhere i wished i was .
When i manifested that thru an autoimmune process and got clos to
death , i
started to realise that the death,  i was afraid of was not the
physical
death  ( i was attracted to it as a solution ) but  of my own
aliveness and
my own anger to want a vengeance.
I was trying to make myself as pure and innocent as possible so the
contrast
with the torturer was more stricking .

all of this was not accessible to my consciousness then but i know now
that
it was there so....

>
>I mentioned this idea to afforementioned vegetarian number one, and she
>insisted that I was full of crap, then elaborated that her decision to be
>vegetarian was based on the cost of meat. Now I know this person, she
thinks
>she doesn't *deserve* expensive things. It's complicated. (I also think
that
>gluten and casein are making her a little schizo, and yes I really mean
>that.)

...so no wonder when you dialogue that way with somebody you will
enconter
defensiveness , denial.
so next time , do the opposite go in the same direction , ask  from
curioisty how it is for this person to experience meat eating activity
,how
it feel etc ...
way more chance for the person to realise that the  deep motivation
for
abstening of meats could be of a diferente nature that the
rationalisations
at the surface.


Now vegetarianism can be a choice of "salvation from pain " but not
allways
and there is many other way to deal with that fondamental pain of
living un
unatural life. the tough guy who goes hunting and is proud of his
insensibility can be the other side of the "victim mentatlty . ( if
victims
are needed,  better that is not me )
So basically we are all feeling victimised , vegetarian or not .

jean-claude