The author of Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (a woman, since you ask) has sold millions of copies because she is an accomplished and intelligent writer. The novel alternates between two unreliable narrators: the husband and wife, whose lies and confessions Flynn handles with great technical skill. Without shoving images of poverty in the readers' faces, she also describes post-recession America with its abandoned shopping malls, homeless beggars and downwardly mobile couples like the Dunnes. She can write lines that stay with you. When Nick Dunne looks back to how he and Amy thought they had  secured a glamorous future in the New York magazine business until the internet destroyed its finances, he thinks:

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quickly enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers.

Which isn't bad at all. Above all, Flynn creates a convincing picture of an awful marriage. Nick drags Amy back to his dowdy hometown in the Midwest. She grows to hate him as he cheats on her, and she realises how shrivelled and hopeless her life has become. In other words, Flynn makes her a credible character, not just a she-monster.

If most thrillers portrayed women as conniving murderers, the critics would still have half a case. Most thrillers do nothing of sort. Men are nearly always the villains. By denouncing Gone Girl as an aid to rapists, Flynn's critics are not making a stand against misogyny but arguing for a Victorian morality in which the gentle sex can only be victims. This is hardly feminism.

They have an audience, no doubt about it, among those who are primed to search for offence and scream when they find it.  If they look hard enough, they can find it everywhere. November, to take a topical instance, is also "Movember" when men persuade their friends to sponsor them to grow a moustache to raise funds to improve men's health. The men have a laugh. The organisers collect impressive sums: £346 million, to date, for programmes in 21 countries tackling prostate and testicular cancer. I could not see how anyone might object until the left-wing New Statesman denounced it. British colonialists favoured moustaches, it said, so Movember had "imperial connotations". Meanwhile Kurds, Indians and Mexicans often wore moustaches all year round, so could not grow them afresh. Movember, therefore "reinforces the ‘othering' of ‘foreigners' by the generally clean-shaven, white majority", as well as marginalising "groups of men who may struggle to grow facial hair, such as trans-men".

Assuming readers understood the clunking, jargon-filled prose, what would they do? They might agree that raising money for charity was imperialist, racist and transphobic, just as they might say Gone Girl helped rapists. I suspect most would want nothing more to do with a leftish milieu where the simple act of raising money for a good cause, like the simple pleasure of watching an intelligent thriller, led to frenzied denunciations.

As they left it behind, they would also be just a little more receptive the next time Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen told them that the politically correct wanted to ban everything, and silence everyone, and the only way to find freedom was to take a sharp turn to the Right.