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It is an accepted fact that there is a fundamental antagonism between men and women. Ordinarily, this antagonism is conscious, although the depth of feeling and its sources are unconscious. The unconscious sources of this conflict are usually displaced to superficial, rationalized disagreeable traits; and since no individual is perfect, it is easy to find sources of irritation and anger that seem rational. This is the 'normal' ambivalence of the sexes. In neurotics, hostility and aggression are more deeply repressed; anxiety replaces antagonism, and ambivalence often manifests itself in hysterical symptoms. But 'normal' or neurotic, there is in everyone a certain fear of the opposite sex and more or less repressed hostility and aggression.
The unconscious fear in men of women is based on the early distortion of fact that to men they are castrated, and where the penis is in man, woman has a place where blood issues from time to time. The horror primitive man had, and many civilized men as well, of the menstruating woman is well known and has been studied by Daly, Frazer, and others. Another reason why man fears woman is his infantile dependence upon his mother for care and love. The mother's attitude is often such as to make the boy feel that he is in danger of being swallowed up, at least psychologically, by her. In folklore and poetic imagery all men are swallowed up again by Mother Earth in the grave, or in the sea which Swinburne calls 'the gray sweet mother'.
Independence from his mother is comparatively simple for the boy compared to the girl. The boy has only to shift his love to another woman, while the girl has first to turn from the mother to the father, a love for the same sex to the opposite. Even without complications, this is not an easy step, however organically facilitated by the anatomical facts, that the vagina