Spanish

Pederasta

pederast. In ancient Greece, the pederast was the adult man who maintained a consensual physical relationship with a teenage boy in a ritual of conventions, socially accepted, that constitute the system of homosexual relationship teacher-pupil. After the rediscovery of classical culture with medieval eyes, the word pederast begins to acquire negative nuances.

The term pederast is recovered in the 19th century such as shown in the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (DRAE) from 1899 with the meaning of “who commits sexual abuse against children”. In this way, the nuances that separate Greek pederasty and platonic love of crime and abuse, are eliminated. Popularly, homosexuality with Greek pederasty is related, so also, in this 1899 edition, the DRAE includes sodomite (who commits sodomy) as meaning of pederast, and defines sodomy as “concúbito between same sex, or against the natural order”, to add in 2001 “practice of anal intercourse “. In this way the criminalization of homosexual was reinforced, because according to the dictionary, a pederast is a sodomite and sodomite is a homosexual. Fortunately, the 23th edition of the DRAE no longer sets with their definitions the link between the criminal pederast and homosexual man, important issue if we consider that in many countries the word pederast, any variant and any word that sounds phonetically similar, are used to insult and criminalize homosexual men.