I am a college student studying Japanese and on a recent essay assignment I was docked points for using 僕 to refer to myself. It was corrected to 私every time. My professor (native speaker) said 僕 is colloquial, but did not remove points from any of the other men in the class for using it. I ask since i am the only gay man in the class, is it uncommon for gay men to use 僕? She also corrected my use of 彼氏 to パートナー, is that standard too?
3 comments
If it’s actually “formal” it would be better to use 筆者 instead of any personal pronoun but 私 is slightly more polite. If anything 私 is the one that gay men would be more likely to use (a lot of times in fiction use of Watashi in informal speech is meant to suggest a character is gay or effeminate). Hard to judge from your post what’s going on to be honest with you.
It has nothing to do with being gay or not.
僕 is a moderately informal first person pronoun, and mostly for spoken Japanese. So if you’re trying to use it while writing in fairly standard desu/masu college Japanese class grammar, it clashes with the rest of your sentence.
The politeness level of your pronoun choice needs to match the politeness level of the rest of your sentence grammar, and the overall context of the writing, or it just sounds odd. So I understand the correction in the context of a written essay.
However, I don’t have any explanation for why she would only correct you, if other male students also used it in the same formal writing.
Similarly, 彼氏 has a moderately informal ring to it, whereas パートナー feels more polite and neutral. (At least to me.) This one is open to individual interpretation as well, though. Even in English, gay guys themselves can waffle between saying “boyfriend” vs. “partner” in formal contexts.
if she only docked points from you she’s probably being a cunt. if she corrected boyfriend to partner she’s probably being homophobic.
like yeah i would say it’s not appropriate for formal writing so it’s true, but if the others weren’t penalized you ought to have words.
anyway most of the gay men i know either use 俺 or go hyper fem and use あたし. and 私 for anything remotely formal. i don’t know any that would say 僕.