Most feminist readers will disagree, but I think this identification is not myth but reality. She is Medusa, in whom Freud sees the castrating and castrated female pubes. But Medusa's snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature. Sex is metaphysical for men, as it is not for women. Women have no problem to solve by sex.
Man is condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directedness.
The compartmentalizing of male genitality leads to dissociation of sex and emotion. It is a temenos or ritual precinct, a Greek word I adopt for the discussion of art. Every woman is a priestess guarding the temenos of daemonic mysteries. Virginity is categorically different for the sexes. A boy becoming a man quests for experiences.