Are You Teto or Egen? Korea's New Gender Energy Is Rewriting How We Perform Identity
When SNL Korea aired "When a Teto Man Falls in Love" in July 2025, over 2 million viewers watched BTOB's Yook Sung-jae play an egen man dumped by his teto girlfriend. The punchline: she leaves him for a MORE egen boyfriend. Then Yook's character "undergoes a brutal teto transformation"—growing a thick beard, hitting the gym, embodying raw masculine energy.
The sketch went viral not because it was funny. It went viral because everyone watching knew EXACTLY what teto and egen meant without needing explanation. Korean Gen Z had already internalized a whole framework for understanding gender performance that exists nowhere else in the world.
The terms come from testosterone and estrogen—teto for bold, athletic, confident energy; egen for gentle, appearance-conscious, softer energy. But here's what makes it revolutionary: these energies aren't tied to your biological sex. Teto men and egen men both exist. Teto women and egen women both exist. The framework describes how you perform gender, not what gender you are.
By the time the sketch aired, the terms had already fundamentally restructured how young Koreans think about attraction, compatibility, fashion, and identity itself. Over 1.16 million people had taken the teto-egen test. K-pop fans were categorizing every idol. Dating apps were adding compatibility filters. Fashion magazines were publishing styling guides for "teto looks" vs "egen aesthetics."
And most of the world had no idea this was happening.
Here's what Western coverage gets wrong
When international media finally noticed teto/egen, they treated it like MBTI 2.0—another Korean personality test trend, maybe quirky, probably temporary. The Korea Herald ran explainers. The Straits Times published definitions: "a teto man is masculine and athletic, while an egen man is gentle and appearance-conscious."
Technically accurate. Completely missing the point.
Here's what that surface-level coverage misses: teto and egen aren't just describing personality types. They're revealing how Korean culture transmits sophisticated knowledge about gender performance through purely kinesthetic channels. No instruction manual. No explicit rules. Just bodies watching other bodies until they develop competence in recognizing and performing different gender energies.
This is cultural transmission operating below conscious awareness. Korean Gen Z didn't study teto/egen definitions and then apply them. They absorbed the framework by consuming thousands of hours of K-pop performances, Instagram styling content, variety show appearances, and street fashion photography. Their bodies learned to recognize the patterns before their minds could articulate the rules.
By the time someone created a formal test to measure it, Korean youth had already been performing these distinctions for years.
The runway gave permission, but Korea rewrote the rules
Here's what we didn't see at the time.
Last February, we were shooting Seoul Fashion Week F/W25 at DDP. Standard documentation—catalog the looks, capture the styling choices, archive the season's aesthetic directions. We photographed two models wearing fishnets and garter details, posted them to @seoulstreetstudios, wrote our captions analyzing the individual looks.
"Frosted Fur & Fishnets" we called the first one. We shot @c.hwa_s___ wearing a cream shearling coat layered over a leather mini, dramatic feather trim adding texture, chunky brown leather boots grounding the look in practical reality. The fishnets added textural contradiction—plush fur meeting daring transparency. Croc-embossed bag, architectural lines against DDP's curved silver dome. Bold. Luxurious. Commanding winter street style.
"Deadly Nightshade" we titled the second. We photographed @neko.ethiriel in black leather everything—studded bodice, raw-edged tattoos visible on pale skin, harsh strobe lighting cutting her from the fluorescent-lit food court backdrop. Fishnets paired with leather and lace creating pure underground energy. Androgynous features, threatening pose, gender-fluid presence transforming mundane space into industrial nightlife aesthetic.
We posted both. Moved on to the next show. Documented a hundred other looks that season.
What we completely missed: these weren't just two different styling approaches to the same trend object. They were two different performances of gendered energy that Korean Gen Z had already been categorizing for months while we were busy thinking about texture and silhouette.
The garter stockings were the anchor. Everything else was directional choice. @c.hwa_s___ pushed toward luxe-feminine-bold—the kind of styling that says "I'm performing high fashion femininity with an edge." @neko.ethiriel pushed toward underground-androgynous-aggressive—the kind of styling that says "I'm performing gender ambiguity through subcultural codes."
Same object. Two completely different energy directions. And we didn't have language for what we were seeing until the teto/egen framework gave us vocabulary for the pattern.
Korean fashion media caught on fast. Cosmopolitan Taiwan started running makeup tutorials: "Makeup for Egen Women"—clean, neat, soft tones emphasizing natural features. Elle Taiwan published Instagram reels categorizing Twice members (Nayeon: teto girl; other members analyzed frame by frame). Beauty YouTubers produced entire series on achieving teto vs egen looks using the same products but different application techniques.
The fashion distinctions are specific and systematic:
Teto fashion: Combat boots or chunky sneakers (never heels—heels code as overtly sexual, which isn't the point). Leather jackets, oversized blazers, crop tops, statement jewelry in silver tones. Strong silhouettes. Lots of black. Attitude worn as an accessory. The message: confident, bold, taking up space.
Egen fashion: Soft neutrals—beige, cream, light gray, pastels. Cozy knits and cardigans. Delicate layering. "Boyfriend" silhouettes that suggest you borrowed someone's clothes. Minimal jewelry in gold tones. Everything slightly oversized but styled to look effortless rather than intentional. The message: approachable, gentle, aesthetically refined.
Here's where it gets interesting: these aren't just personal style preferences. They're culturally legible signals that other Korean Gen Z individuals can read instantly. When someone styles garter stockings with combat boots and a leather jacket, everyone recognizes "teto" without needing the label. When someone pairs the same garter stockings with an oversized knit sweater and soft makeup, it reads as "attempting teto object with egen energy"—a recognized hybrid that creates specific aesthetic tension.
The business side nobody's talking about: Online shopping platforms like Musinsa, Chuu, and 29CM are quietly reorganizing their interfaces around these categories. Not explicitly labeled "teto" and "egen"—that would be too on-the-nose—but curated collections with names like "bold statement pieces" and "soft everyday essentials" that map directly onto the framework. Korean e-commerce figured out that Gen Z shops by vibe, not by product category.
What your body knows that your mind can't articulate
Ask a Korean Gen Z woman to define teto energy and she'll struggle. "It's just...bold? Confident? Like, you know when you see it?" But watch her style an outfit and she'll execute perfect teto logic—strong silhouette, edgy accessories, commanding presence—without consciously thinking through each choice.
This is embodied cultural knowledge in its purest form.
Here's how it actually works: You're watching aespa's Winter perform on stage. She's doing "Savage"—sharp movements, intense facial expressions, all-black outfit with strategic cutouts, fierce energy projecting into the audience. You're not consciously analyzing her performance. You're just watching.
But your brain is extremely busy. Your mirror neurons are firing, simulating what it would feel like to move like that, project that energy, inhabit that attitude. You're experiencing proprioceptive simulation—your body is learning what "teto" feels like from the inside even though you're just observing from the outside.
Do this for hundreds of hours across dozens of performances, and something remarkable happens: your body develops sophisticated competence in recognizing and performing teto energy before your mind can articulate a single rule about it.
This is how Korean culture actually spreads globally—not through conscious study but through bodies absorbing frameworks by watching performances, trying on attitudes, simulating movements. By the time you can articulate the rules, you've already been performing them for months.
The mechanism is identical to how K-pop choreography creates global dance competence, how Korean beauty standards spread through makeup tutorials, how café culture transmits through Instagram photography. Visual consumption leads to kinesthetic knowledge. Bodies learn. Minds catch up later.
The teto/egen framework just makes this process visible. Korean psychologists and professors at Seoul National University express concern about the trend, warning that "such identity tests risk reinforcing oversimplified binaries." They're right to worry—any framework that reduces human complexity to two categories deserves scrutiny.
But they're missing what makes teto/egen different from traditional personality typing: it's explicitly teaching that gender performance is learned, not innate. The test might categorize you as "teto woman" today, but the entire cultural conversation around it emphasizes fluidity. You can be teto at work and egen at home. You can be egen in personality but teto in fashion. The categories describe energies you perform, not identities you possess.
Korean Gen Z treats teto/egen like a mood board, not a diagnosis. "I'm feeling very egen today" means styling choices, not personality shifts. "He's giving major teto energy in that outfit" is an aesthetic observation, not a judgment about his essential nature.
This fluidity is the point. Unlike MBTI, which sorts people into fixed types, teto/egen explicitly embraces situational performance. Unlike Western masculinity/femininity frameworks, which remain stubbornly tied to biological sex, teto/egen explicitly crosses those boundaries. Teto men and egen men aren't aberrations—they're central to the framework.
The gender thing everyone's avoiding
Let's be direct about the problem: teto comes from "testosterone," egen from "estrogen." Using hormone names to describe behavioral patterns is biological essentialism wearing trendy clothes. It suggests that masculine/feminine energies trace back to chemistry, which is exactly the kind of gender determinism that feminist theory spent decades dismantling.
Korean critics are right to raise red flags. Professor Kwak Geum-joo at Seoul National University warns that "categorizing people into 'teto men' or 'egen men' is another attempt to simplify complex human nature." She's not wrong—humans are wired to categorize, but that doesn't mean every categorization system helps us understand reality better.
But here's what makes teto/egen culturally innovative despite its problematic origins: it took biological language and made it describe something explicitly cultural.
In practice, nobody using teto/egen is talking about actual hormone levels. They're talking about vibe. Energy. Aesthetic. The performance of gender rather than the biology of sex. The hormone metaphor is just linguistic scaffolding for a more complex idea: that masculine and feminine energies exist independently of male and female bodies, and that everyone has access to both energies depending on context, mood, and intention.
This is Korea solving a problem that Western culture is still struggling with: how do you talk about gendered energy without essentializing gender itself?
Western discourse offers two unsatisfying options: either gender is purely socially constructed (which feels intellectually correct but experientially incomplete), or it's biologically determined (which feels experientially resonant but politically regressive). Academic gender theory provides sophisticated frameworks—Judith Butler's performativity, Jack Halberstam's female masculinity—but these remain largely confined to university seminar rooms.
Korean Gen Z said: what if we just made it a personality quiz that everyone can take on their phone?
The move is simultaneously regressive and progressive. Regressive because it uses biological metaphors. Progressive because it completely detaches those metaphors from biological bodies. Teto women aren't "acting like men"—they're performing a specifically feminine energy that happens to be bold. Egen men aren't "effeminate"—they're performing a specifically masculine energy that happens to be gentle and appearance-conscious.
The framework creates space for four distinct performances of gendered energy rather than two, and it does so without pathologizing any of them. In conservative Korea, where gender norms remain relatively rigid, this represents genuine cultural innovation.
Could it reinforce stereotypes? Absolutely. Are young women getting categorized and judged based on their teto/egen type? Definitely happening. Does the biological language do conceptual damage even when people treat it metaphorically? Probably yes.
But it's also giving an entire generation vocabulary for something they were already performing. Gender as energy. Gender as mood. Gender as vibe. These aren't academic concepts—they're lived experiences that people recognize immediately when given language to describe them.
Why this matters beyond Korea
By the time Western media discovers teto/egen, it will probably be misunderstood as "Korean gender roles" or flattened into trend pieces about "Korean dating culture." The actual mechanism—how this framework spread kinesthetically through K-pop consumption and social media immersion—will get buried under surface-level observations about personality tests and dating app filters.
But pay attention to HOW it spreads.
If teto/egen goes global—and given K-pop's reach, it probably will—watch for these patterns:
The kinesthetic transmission: Will non-Korean fans start performing teto/egen energy before they can define it? Will bodies absorb the framework through watching Korean content, just like Korean Gen Z did? Or will it remain a conscious import, something people read about and then try to apply?
The cultural specificity: Korean teto isn't the same as Western "masculine energy." Korean egen isn't just "being feminine." These categories carry specific cultural meanings shaped by Korean aesthetic traditions, social norms, and pop culture contexts. When non-Koreans perform teto/egen, will they capture these cultural specifics or just map them onto their existing gender frameworks?
The adaptation patterns: How will cultures with different gender systems receive this framework? Will conservative cultures reject it as too fluid? Will gender-progressive cultures dismiss it as too binary? Will it get adapted into something completely different as it moves across cultural contexts?
The broader pattern is what matters. Korean digital culture has figured out how to transmit sophisticated cultural knowledge—about aesthetics, about gender, about identity performance—through purely visual channels. No instruction manuals. No classroom lessons. Just content consumption creating embodied competence.
This is the same mechanism that spread Korean makeup techniques globally, that made Korean café culture instantly recognizable in Vietnam, that taught millions of people Korean choreography without dance classes. Visual platforms enable mimetic transmission of cultural knowledge at unprecedented speed and scale.
The West spent decades theorizing gender performativity in academic texts. Korea taught an entire generation that gender is performance by making it something you can scroll through on Instagram, practice in front of your mirror, and perform in your daily fashion choices.
The pattern it represents is permanent
In five years, teto/egen will probably seem as dated as blood type personality theory. The specific terms will feel 2025-vintage, maybe a little embarrassing in retrospect. New frameworks will emerge with new vocabulary, better metaphors, more nuanced categories.
But it will have done its job: teaching an entire generation that gender is something you perform, not something you are. That masculine and feminine energies exist independently of male and female bodies. That you can inhabit different gender performances depending on context, mood, and intention. That these performances are legible to others who've learned the same cultural language.
Korean culture spread these lessons kinesthetically, through K-pop stages and Instagram posts and beauty tutorials, faster than Western academia ever could through books and lectures. Bodies learned by watching other bodies. Mirror neurons did the teaching. Conscious articulation came later, after the knowledge was already embodied.
That's the real story. Teto/egen just made it visible.