Other Than full transcript
ALLISON: Jeromey was 16 when the hair began.
JEROMEY: It started on my cheeks. And then and then my jaw line and then eventually it just started on my neck. And then beneath my jaw. So pretty much my entire neck. It was just like hair.
And then over time it just got thicker and thicker and longer and more coarse and I just didn't really know what to do. And [sigh] so I just didn't do anything about it. And so I would just walk around with hair on my face.
When I started shaving it, shaving just didn't really help. It just made it worse.
I was so self-conscious about it to the point where I wore nothing but turtlenecks and I was in turtlenecks or scarves. It would be 110 degrees and you'll still see me in a turtleneck or a scarf.
At that age just like you know sort of becoming you know a woman and and for me it felt like I was not becoming a woman that felt like I was becoming something other than.
ALLISON: Becoming a woman comes with one instruction: be beautiful. So in adolescence, girls carry purses before they have anything to put in them and they wear bras before they have breasts. We believe that if we do these things, we will be desired, and then, we will become sexual beings. But if you feel yourself becoming other than, as Jeromey did, how can you find your sexuality? Where will you get your power? This is a dark story. But it’s in the darkness that she finds her answer. I’m Allison Behringer and this is Bodies, a show about people solving mysteries about their bodies.
Jeromey was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her parents immigrated from Belize. Her father left when she was young, and from 12 years old, she lived in a one bedroom apartment in the LA neighborhood, Baldwin Village, or “The Jungles” as it’s called. Her brother slept in the living room. She and her older sister, on a bunk bed, in the bedroom with their mom.
Over time, the springs wore through the mattress and she’d wake up with cuts on her body. As close as the family was, physically, she didn’t have a good relationship with them. She was raised to see the world in black and and white. There was good and there was evil. From a young age, Jeromey was fascinated with the dark side of things, an unwelcome curiosity in a religious environment. She spent a lot of time at the library.
High school was a lonely, difficult time. Her otherness was cemented by the kids who taunted her for being overweight and having big lips. And the hair kept growing. Her mom and sister didn’t help. Jeromey was totally lost when it came to grooming. California Medicaid didn’t cover anything beside the basics. And so Jeromey didn’t see a doctor about the hair.
JEROMEY: when I was in high school I thought I was the ugliest person in the world like I thought I was just hideous. just thought that was monstrous,
ALLISON: She didn’t have many friends. And never had crushes on anyone.
JEROMEY: I actually thought I was asexual because I just didn't really like anyone but then I realize it was just because of how I felt about my body and how I felt I looked. I just didn't feel like that part of life was available to me.
And I just would get teased all the time. I've gotten rumors spreading out about me that I was, you know, a hermaphrodite. That was transitioning or something.
ALLISON: One day she came home feeling like it was all gonna boil over.
JEROMEY: It was a very dark experience dealing with these emotions. And I just wanted to get rid of it. And I just felt that ugly. I felt like it was killing me and I just kind of felt like I just had to just kill it first.
I just had these images and then I had the anger and how do I turn these feelings into real physical beings?
And so I was, so you know I need to make something I didn't know what.
ALLISON: So she went to the computer. And she started typing.
JEROMEY: Helena Helena what must we do to save a sad little girl like you. You're offensive displeasing to the eye hoping waiting wishing to die ugly, ugly that's what you see. The more you believe the uglier you will be. Her red coat in her black dress. All the kids point all the kids whisper How can God create such a mess?
Four little beauties. Wisdom envy wrath and despair blinded by false beauty with arrogance to spare. wrath with the hair of gold, envy with the eyes of diamonds wisdom and despair with the bodies fierce as a lion. She grabs wrath and shaves off her precious hair. Wrath had no control, wraths screams and fear. She takes a knife and carves envy's eyes out. She stretches her arms her blood pours out.
After I finished it was like the anger kind of subsided and then I went back and read it and I was like wow, I was really angry. [laughs]
And it was kind of like I was looking back at my own vomit. And I was just like looking at it saying Wow that's how that's really dark and kind of disturbing. But it was something that needed to come out. And so, there it is.
ALLISON: Jeromey wrote a lot of stories like this. But she mostly kept it to herself. She was afraid her violent dark stories would alienate people. When she did share her work,
JEROMEY: They're just like yeah, you're a little bit too much for me so I'm just going to step away. And so that's happened to me a lot.
ALLISON: After her junior year, she got a scholarship to go to a summer film program for high schoolers at New York University. After that, she set her heart on going to NYU for college. Her dream was to write and direct horror films.
JEROMEY: I just feel like I'm just a strange paradox where I'm like I have low self-esteem. But at the same time I'm confident. Education was always really important to me. Like I come from a poor environment and I just didn't want to be there. And there was that drive that kind of pushed me out of my self destructive habits.
ALLISON: NYU was the only college she applied for. But she didn’t get in. Jeromey was heartbroken. With nothing to do and no school to go to, things started getting especially bad.
JEROMEY: I felt like the depression was me. Like depression wasn’t something that was outside of myself that was separate from me.
ALLISON: The depression got so bad, that she was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. It was a really traumatic experience for her, but someone was finally saying to her: You need help. This is bad. This is not normal.
JEROMEY: It was the first time that the severity of my unhappiness was acknowledged.
ALLISON: Jeromey found a therapist she liked. And she started talking about how much the hair was bothering her.
JEROMEY Instinctively I just felt like you know if my hormones are off and imbalanced enough that I'm growing hair all over the place and I can only imagine what it's doing to me psychologically and to my moods and to how I feel about myself. And so she went to a clinic that accepted Medicaid.
I showed them my hair, body hair. Look at the hair on my face and my neck. There has to be something wrong. They attributed it to my weight. And you know told me is possibly because I'm quote unquote, obese. You know my weight was something that they always brought up. I just gave up on that for a while. I just thought I would never get help with this.
ALLISON: She was hardly leaving the one bedroom apartment. She had terrible insomnia and would stay up late after her mom and siblings had gone to bed, watching old horror films. Her self-education began.
JEROMEY: Personally, I always associate horror with blood and gore, and violence against women. Once I started digging and started watching more obscure films I was like wow this is really really great. And I started ignoring all the crap that you see and like mainstream horror.
ALLISON: She watched old black and whites, cult classics, foreign language films, From Korea, Japan, Italy and France.
JEROMEY: It feels like there's like a snake moving up your body like that's what it feels like every time I watch any kind of Japanese horror or Korean horror. And I love that.
ALLISON: She fell in love with the lighting. She was captivated by the power of the female characters.
ALLISON: One of Jeromey’s favorite horror films is Ginger Snaps. It’s a cult classic, and it's about these two sisters named Ginger and Bridget. On the same night that Ginger gets her first period, she gets bit by a werewolf. Over the course of the film, as Ginger is becoming a woman, she’s also becoming a werewolf. The first time Jeromey watched it:
JEROMEY: I was like oh my gosh that is me. That is my body. I had hair growing out of my face and I felt like I was turning into something and didn't know what. I've always been drawn to much darker works of art. like monsters or just disfigured beings. I find in a weird way a kinship with the horror genre. Horror is where the other was celebrated.
ALLISON: And she realized that this was an art form that could communicate her experience.
JEROMEY: I was just like I didn't know you could use horror to actually talk about something so personal and it was scary but it was also very hilarious and relatable.
ALLISON: Jeromey was inspired by all the films she was watching. And at the same time, she was increasingly curious about sex, but had a lot of guilt about it.
Holed up in the cramped apartment, she began making these video essays, combining footage from her favorite films, editing them together with chilling music. I’ve watched one, many times, and it’s a barrage of very sexually explicit clips. It’s really violent, but in the clips she’s chosen, the women aren’t victims. I can hardly watch it through myself without muting it, or turning away. And I cannot imagine the editing process – watching these clips again and again.
JEROMEY: For me it's very pleasant to watch. I never felt disturbed. I think it's like when I'm putting these clips together it's more of just it's hard to explain it feels like I'm releasing something outside of myself.
ALLISON: She was trying to destroy what her religious upbringing had taught about sex: that it was sinful, shameful and only caused pain. Gradually, Jeromey started to leave the apartment more. She got a job, started going to a community college. She knew she wanted to be an artist and took classes in film, dance, and creative writing.
Even though the people at the clinics had told her her hormones were fine, that she just needed to lose weight, she was pretty sure the hair was connected to her hormones. And to her depression.
JEROMEY: I just feel like there has to be some kind of physiological answer to the reason why I'm always sad all the time. And I know that I had you know external stressors and insecurities and all of that. But It just felt much more intense than that. Like the sadness, it just felt very heavy.
ALLISON: She found an endocrinologist, who agreed to see her at a reduced rate. Blood tests showed that her androgen levels were high. Androgens are hormones that direct an intricate dance involving many hormones in our body, but especially ones that have more masculine effects, like testosterone.
JEROMEY: It definitely made me feel less feminine. It just validated my feelings of feeling like this physical dysfunction.
ALLISON: He prescribed an androgen blocker, hoping it would normalize her hormone levels. But that didn’t help with the hair. He thought the hormone imbalance could be due to something happening in her reproductive system. And so he recommended she see a gynecologist.
JEROMEY: I was just like No, no thank you. My reaction was just images of me on a bed and them trying to stick something in me. I spent years just avoiding my body and that includes my female genitalia.
ALLISON: Any time she went to the medical establishment, it always felt like proof that she wasn’t a woman. And so she was scared that if someone were to look at her vagina, well then it’d just confirm that her body belonged in the category of “other.”
JEROMEY: I just thought my vagina was this scary place. And it was not something that should be seen. and it's going to be like cobwebs down there and like a bunch of minions coming out.
ALLISON: After two years at the community college, she applied to film school. She got into the New School in New York City. Between financial help, student loans, and working, she cobbled together tuition.
Her time at The New School was a dance of steps forward and steps back. In the film program, amongst other artists, she wasn’t as much of an outsider. But she still didn’t have many friends, didn’t date, and kept to herself. At this point, she was trying to manage the hair, by pulling it out with a tweezer, sometimes shaving it. It just kept growing. But Jeromey was gaining confidence, like in dance class, and in video editing and in the course she took on feminism in horror films. But as she neared her last semester at The New School, there was one thing that she just hadn’t been able to move past.
JEROMEY: I felt shame over being a virgin. And I was letting it overpower me. And I was living in shame of it.
And you know, having sex for the first time people often equate that with getting mature and becoming a woman. And being a virgin it just made me feel like, like a little girl. like a child. And I think that I carried myself that way as well. I just didn't want to do that anymore.
ALLISON: Some people might solve this problem by going out and sleeping with someone. Not Jeromey. For a while now, she’d been writing erotica fantasies for herself, filling composition notebooks with short stories. And she had starting writing this story about a praying mantis.
JEROMEY: I was thinking of the praying mantis and how they mate, you know their sexual mating process.
ALLISON: For those of us not as well versed in entomology, the female praying mantis eats the male after they mate.
JEROMEY: And I'm just like why can't that be the mating process for humans because that would make things so much easier for me.
ALLISON: It was this idea that inspired her senior thesis film. There was no question of the style.
JEROMEY: Horror is the only genre that can capture entirely that emotional intensity of it all – of all my feelings and fears.
I intentionally set out to overcome my relationship with my virginity because I felt like that needed to happen. I just knew that I wasn't going to be able to really deal with you know depression until I start dealing with these inner feelings that I'm having, which is shame and and confliction, especially when it comes to being a virgin.
She began writing. The film is about an entomologist named Jaleese who’s studying the mating process of the praying mantis. One day she gets a mysterious bug bite on her neck.
JEROMEY: Interior bathroom night. A young woman grimaces as she stares at the bleeding bite on her neck in the mirror...
ALLISON: In the film, Jaleese has this boyfriend, Dinsky, who really wants to have sex with her. But she’s a virgin and she keeps rejecting his advances.
JEROMEY: Interior bedroom night.
Dinsky lays beside her with his face resting on the palm of his hand. He begins to run his fingers down her face as if his hand is a spider. Jaleese aggressively pushes his hand away. STOP! Seriously?
Stop!
Seriously? So you don’t mind creepy crawlies on your skin but not my fingers?
Over the course of the film, you get the sense that Jaleese is starting to go a little crazy from the bug bite. Then she calls up the boyfriend.
Where have you been? You don’t sound so good.
Oh no, I’m fine.
I wanted to know if you wanted to come over.
He embraces her and they begin to kiss.
Jaleese grabs his shoulders and pushes him off of her and onto the bed so that she's on top. She takes off her shirt and they have sex. The screen goes black. A loud scream is heard as we see Jaleese biting on Dinsky’s lip. He screams and struggles. He flails around until his body can no longer move. Jaleese continues to eat other parts of his face until he's barely recognizable. Nothing but blood and guts lay underneath her. His body now living at the corners of her mouth as she continues to eat.
The film ends with a shot of Jaleese straddling the dead boyfriend, looking demonic and satisfied and full of power.
ALLISON: Unlike the character in her film, Jeromey was still a virgin. But she had written herself into the narrative of womanhood. She was a virgin with sexuality, with a unique kind of femininity, derived from darkness and forged in her art.
JEROMEY: If anyone you know thinks that I should be ashamed of being a virgin then just know I'm going to end up eating you!
ALLISON: Making Virgin and the Prey was a creative high point. It’s a really GOOD film, and Jeromey is proud of it. But as anyone knows who’s poured themselves into the making of something, you feel amazing, you feel changed! And then time passes and then you’re back to yourself.
JEROMEY: Because sometimes, you can do all this work and do all this growth. But at the end of the day, your body is your body, we’re attached to our bodies. We’re attached to our genetic lot, and our life experience. And in some ways, no matter what you do, your body is going to come back and say, here I am. Deal with me.
ALLISON: In her final months of senior year, Jeromey made an appointment with a gynecologist. At that point, her periods were also very irregular. She got blood drawn. The results showed very low estrogen levels--like in the postmenopausal range. And high FSH levels. Which indicate that the ovaries are not working properly.
She was diagnosed with primary ovarian insufficiency, or POI for short. POI is rare in women as young as Jeromey, but not uncommon, and for women under 35, the rate is 1 in 250.
JEROMEY: My chances of having children is very little or zero. The lack of estrogen makes me at risk for heart disease and osteoporosis.
And I just knew. I wasn't surprised when she told me.
Because all those years were just kind of feeling like fragments of a woman and having these issues with my hair and just having just feeling very disconnected and disassociated from you know femininity and my womanhood just kind of all tied together at that moment.
ALLISON: After graduation, back in LA, she eventually found an OB-GYN, who specializes in reproductive endocrinology. Jeromey had one of the most severe cases of POI the specialist had seen.
Jeromey and this doctor are currently working together to figure out a hormone replacement therapy that will increase the estrogen levels to relieve some of her symptoms and protect her bones and her heart.
Jeromey’s case is complicated and there are still unknowns. The POI is likely the reason for the hair growth, but it’s not for sure and it’s unclear if hormone replacement therapy will even solve that. And so Jeromey started doing electrolysis, a slow and expensive hair removal treatment. At this point the hair isn’t as big of a deal to her.
And as for the connection between POI and depression--there are higher rates of depression among women with POI. There hasn’t been enough research to say why or what’s causing what. Though there was a recent study that found that depressive symptoms started before the onset of POI.
ALLISON: In Audre Lorde’s essay, The Erotic as Power, she wrote that “The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is the lifeforce of women. In touch with the erotic, you become less willing to accept powerlessness.”
For Jeromey, her art is the erotic.
when you're creating something very personal it's very intimate and it's vulnerable and you know just serve it sort of contains all similar qualities of feelings that you feel when you are intimate with someone. And so it definitely feels like an erotic release and it's kind of like just showing a part of yourself that you don't normally show to anyone.
When faced with darkness, I think most of us look away, close our eyes. Or we let the darkness overwhelm us and fall victim to it.
But Jeromey stares straight into the darkness. Through her art, she’s created beauty in monstrosity. And that is where she found her sexuality and power.
This week in the Bodies Facebook group, We’ll be posting information about POI and other hormonal conditions like PCOS. You’ll be able to find links to Virgin and the Prey and Jeromey’s films. You can find a link to the Bodies facebook group in the show notes OR by going to KCRW.com/bodies. Come share your reactions, your stories, your knowledge. Nothing is off the table, and everyone is welcome. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @bodiespodcast and me at @albtweetin. A L B T W E E TIN. If you like Bodies, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I’ve gotten requests for episode transcripts and one place to find the resources. Well now you can go to the new and improved bodiespodcast.com. Thank you Sarah for your help with the website.
This episode was produced and edited by me, Allison Behringer. Editorial advising from Sharon Mashihi and Camila Kerwin. Original score and sound design by Dara Hirsch. You heard footage from Jeromey’s The Virgin and the Prey, which included music from Sodomus and Klankbeeld. Reporting help from Hannah Harris Green and Kristen Lepore. Caitlin Pierce provided additional feedback. Cover artwork by Sarah Bachman. Episode art by Kathy Farthing. Bodies is made with support from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project. Special thanks to managing editor Kristen Lepore who advised on this episode as well as Nick White and the whole KCRW team. Two weeks from now, we’ll be playing the winners of the Bodies award from the KCRW Radio Race. After that, we’ll picking back up with Bodies episodes. I’m Allison Behringer and this is Bodies.