c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. His home page on the World Wide Web is at http://www.greeley.com. Or contact him via e-mail at agreel(AT)aol.com.)

(RNS)-Humankind is a contentious and stubborn species. It does not always take kindly to wisdom. A human being prefers his or her own insights to facts, data, experience, knowledge and all other evidence to the contrary.

Such obstinacy is independent of age and gender. The old will not learn from the young any more than the young will learn from the old. Male and female refuse to consider the possibility that the other gender might have useful information to share.

It seems to me that in recent years the most intractable members of the species are young women. Nothing seems to shake their serene confidence that they know it all.

Obviously, I speak not of all young women. But I’ve encountered some who believe they know everything and are willing to learn nothing. Consider two examples:

According to research done by the Centers for Disease Control, 40 percent of teenage women smoke, more than half again as many as adult women and as men their age. Why they do it is hard to determine.

Some young women will tell you that smoking is especially useful when they are engaged in what they are pleased to call”girl talk.”But they are unable or unwilling to say why it is necessary to engage in a death pact when they let their hair down.

I respond to such reasoning with sarcasm, encouraging them to continue smoking because by doing so they are rendering an important service to the country. They will die earlier than their non-smoking mothers and thus save the nation considerable health care expenses during the old age they will not have.

My opinion is greeted with giggles. Somehow they don’t care. When you’re 16, who worries about mortality?

The second example involves sexual promiscuity. The problem here is not merely sexually transmitted diseases _ though they are a serious threat _ but in a young woman’s willingness to be exploited.

Recently a Catholic newspaper carried an article about how priests respond to young couples who come to arrange a marriage and are already living together. Some priests demand that one or the other move out of their apartment or that they sleep in different rooms or that they swear they will not make love until their marriage is officially blessed.

Such demands, in my opinion, violate the rights in canon law of the young people to the sacrament of marriage and are a horrendous abuse of clerical power. The priest in such a situation should find reason to rejoice in the couple’s understanding that there is more to human union than just sleeping together.

But what I find really fascinating are the vacuous arguments that young women use to justify sexual promiscuity.

When presented with evidence indicating that living together before marriage correlates negatively with the later success of marriage, many young women dismiss or ignore such findings on the grounds that the data don’t apply in their case.

To suggest to a young woman involved in a sexual relationship that she is being exploited by her partner is to invite blithe disagreement.”I’m not being exploited,”is the common response.”I’m in love and it is wonderful.” Perhaps for some young women living in sin does feel wonderful at first. And perhaps they are in love. But generally, such liaisons end up being pure male exploitation. It may be nurture or it may be nature or it may be some combination of two, but most women seek commitment and most men seek to avoid it.

Living together outside of marriage is just fine for many a young man. He can count on having a loving woman in his bed without having to make any deep or meaningful commitment. And when his passion cools, he can get out of the situation simply by leaving-without any particular injury to his ego or self-esteem.

The young woman’s heart is likely to be broken (though she may pretend that it is not). And that’s a shame. But if you trust a young man, you run that risk.

Be it smoking cigarettes or engaging in promiscuous sex, why does a young woman put herself at risk?

I suspect that it is pervasive lack of self esteem. If a woman doesn’t think well of herself, it’s easy to slip into dangerous situations- physical and spiritual

And why is women’s self-esteem so low? Perhaps because in this age of pseudo-equality, women are not worth what they once were-in their own eyes and in the eyes of the men who presumably love them.

JC END GREELEY