Is 僕 nowadays used by females as well?

8 comments

1. [deleted]

2. It will be eccentric behaviour, but yeah, those people rarely exists.

3. yes i’ve met several women that use it, it tends to be a younger generation and it’s not extremely common (yet) but it certainly is starting to move towards being more used

   if a woman chooses to use it they might get side eye, depending on the social situation, then again there’s a lot of side eye that goes around for many things

4. [Using 僕 as a woman](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/ufbmme/using_%E5%83%95_as_a_woman/) (posted two months ago)

   [Gendered First-person Pronouns in Japanese](https://youtu.be/eGye-SnPYOg): Professor Nakamura Momoko explains why some girls use masculine pronouns.　(update: I read that Mogami Moga uses watashi now)

   tldr: it’s not the norm but there are some girls who prefer to use boku in private.

5. I once spent an afternoon reading about this subject on Japanese message boards, what I could gather:

   – The younger, the more likely: in some primary and middle school classes 1/4 to 1/2 seem to use it but they’re often socially discouraged from it as they age.
   – Many of those though say they continue to use it either with people they always did, or with people who seem to not care about it, but never to a stranger, which might explain why some people say they commonly see it, but others say they never heard it.

   They definitely “can” use it. It’s not considered grammatically wrong as some things might be in, say, Spanish or Arabic for different genders and it’s more similar to whether, say, a male “can” grow his hair long which is of course. It’s also of course very common in song lyrics or titles of fiction to use “僕” and also “君” even when clearly from the perspective of a female character, who will otherwise never in the work of fiction itself use those. It’s really quite common in musicals for female characters to suddenly use “僕” and “君” when singing, but never when speaking.

   Also, I commonly read read the interpretation that it’s mostly or only done by females with a more “masculine” mindset or clothing style which I don’t feel reflects reality at all and also does not necessarily seem to be the impression Japanese people on message boards have of those that use it. — That simply seems to be something divined because it’s “obvious” but doesn’t seem to hold up in practice.

6. It’s not against the rules to ask this, but this is asked a lot. If you want a lot of answers you can use the search.

7. Females can also use it to talk to their sons as a second person pronoun.

8. Here’s a thought: In your culture does a man typically have long or short hair? Why? Assuming the answer is short, could a man choose to have long hair despite it breaking the social norm? And could you imagine other cultures where it would be “normal” to have long hair, and “abnormal” to have short?

   Like many things associated with gender, it’s kind of an arbitrary social construct. Older folks tend to be more conservative with the roles, while younger folks tend to be less so.