Women and animals have historically been misrepresented and oppressed in patriarchal societies and are repeatedly seen as subservient to men, making women and animals interchangeable beings in regards to their oppression. Carol J. Adams connects women with animals in her feminist-vegetarian theory, arguing that male dominance in society is detrimental to the well-being of women and animals alike. Her theory of the "absent referent" illuminates how we eliminate animals from our thoughts as we are eating meat. We can also apply the absent referent to how women are used as objects in media. In Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats, Jane uses the women she hand picks as pawns in her own personal career goal of being a documentarian, oppressing the women she records on her show. Jane uses her role as a director to further her own personal agenda, effectively erasing the individualities of the women via manipulation of language and dismemberment of their narratives, objectifying the women in the process. Similar to how animals are absent when they are presented on a plate in front of us, Jane's techniques as a director and editor make the rich, individual lives of the women absent on her show as she selects what is recorded and what is not for her own selfish gains. Jane is not interested in bettering the lives of the women on her show and she continues to film a variety of women who lose their unique individualities throughout the entire novel, mirroring how women and animals are made absent in patriarchal media.