What does pandering mean?

Meaning Of Pandering

I haven't done anything to be charged with pandering, and if I had I wouldn't tell you.

Pandering in its general sense means helping someone to achieve something they want, and the something is what most people would consider immoral, or dishonourable, or just plain yucky. If you help someone with finding deserving people to give money to, you are not pandering. If you help someone to find people to rob, you are pandering.

In the legal sense, it refers to helping someone do something that's illegal because it's immoral. It usually means helping an act of prostitution happen. A pimp may be charged with pandering because he has connected a prostitute with her customers. Different places may have different things that can result in a charge of pandering, but that's the most common.

MW gives the main meaning of pander as: to do or provide what someone wants or demands even though it is not proper, good, or reasonable.

For example: "He wants you to drive fifty miles there and back just to collect him from the party? Don't pander to him."

In my experience in British English there is no offence called "pandering", so I guess that you are not in the UK - maybe in the USA?

In normal modern (British) English, "pandering" means being excessively keen on suiting your actions to somebody else's ideas. Often seen as "pandering to somebody's taste" - doing things that you know they will like, even if you think they are silly ideas.

One answer says that it is a very old-fashioned (archaic) way of referring to acting as a pimp, or similar (maybe even "grooming" a child for sexual activity?), so maybe that is what the name of the offence means in your law system.

Procuring or pandering is the facilitation or provision of a prostitute in the arrangement of a sex act with a customer.[1] A procurer, colloquially called a pimp (if male) or a madam (if female), is an agent for prostitutes who collects part of their earnings. The procurer may receive this money in return for advertising services, physical protection, or for providing, and possibly monopolizing, a location where the prostitute may engage clients. Like prostitution, the legality of certain actions of a madam or a pimp vary from one region to the next.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandering_(prostituti...

# A person who furthers the illicit love-affairs of others; a pimp or procurer, especially when male. (Later panderer.)  [quotations ▼]

* 1992, Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright, translating Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Folio Society 2005, p. 190:

It was not only the brilliant phalanx of virtuous dowagers, generals and academicians with whom he was most intimately associated that Swann so cynically compelled to serve him as panders.

# An offer of illicit sex with a third party.

# An illicit or illegal offer, usually to tempt.

# (by extension) One who ministers to the evil designs and passions of another.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pander#

* Pandering (politics), the expression of one's views in a manner that appeals to voters

* Procuring (prostitution), the facilitation of a prostitute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandering_(disambigua...

1. (intransitive) foll by to to give gratification (to weaknesses or desires)

2. (archaic when transitive) to act as a go-between in a sexual intrigue (for)

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/englis...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/panderin...

Pimping.