Gone Girl: The war of the sexes is just beginning

Towards the end of Gone Girl, Ben Affleck's Nick tells Rosamund Pike's Amy: "Yes I loved you. But then all we did was resent each other, try to control each other, cause each other pain."

She turns around calmly in the middle of the heated tirade and tells him: "That's marriage."

David Fincher's Gone Girl is a nasty piece of work, nastier than the book. It's also the ultimate backlash book. In 1991, Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argued that feminism was being challenged by a concert of conservative elements which wanted women to believe that though they had won the equality battle, they had lost the gender war. They may be successful in their careers, but they were miserable in their homes, either having foregone men or babies, or both. Twenty-three years later, despite the working women's anthem of #heforshe, Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and Tina Fey's Bossypants, Gone Girl's success proves that women are pretty much where they left two decades ago. The world is still trying to tell them they can't have it all. There's one counter argument to Lean In - Anne Marie Slaughter says women can't have it all unless men help them.

There's another, articulated with more drama and venom, in Gillian Flynn's 2012 novel, Gone Girl, which was made into the movie. That women are angry, very angry. They are angry about having to be the Cool Girl to catch the Gorgeous Boy; they are angry at having to be the perfect mothers to raise the ideal children; and they are angry at having to be the uncomplaining worker who shatters the glass ceiling and yet doesn't ask for more. They are tired of always being on their best behaviour, of being the dispensers of unconditional love, of constantly being in competition - with other women, other mothers, men. As Amy says of Nick in Gone Girl: "He took and took from me until I no longer existed." Which is pretty much what is happening in India. As women become more aggressive in their work and at home, men become more confused about their roles. Are they business like colleagues, flirtatious friends, sensitive husbands, understanding bosses? They see women around them behaving in ways they are not used to. What is their reaction? Do they dispense with them like Nick tries to do with his wife, telling his sister that he is "so sick of being picked upon by women"'?

Or do the men stick by the women, because that's what grown ups do? "The only time you liked yourself was when you were trying to be someone this c*** might like," Amy says to Nick at one point, having berated him for getting lazy, for not trying, for giving up on her, for believing in the fairytale. Which is Flynn's biggest gift to the feminism debate. Women have had it tough for so long, living up to the ideal. Now it's time for men to feel the heat. In Nick and Amy who go from not wanting to be the dancing monkey husband and the highway patrol wife, the feminism debate has the perfect backlash couple: the boy who won't grow up and the girl who has no option but to. Go see the movie when it comes out next week.

For now, read the book.