So, now that Fleabag has officially finished, where does the Hot Priest fit into the pantheon of ‘hot but mean men’ in pop culture?

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From Heathcliff (obsessive stalker, possible murderer) to Rhett Butler (rapist, member of the Ku Klux Klan), there is truly no shortage of male characters in popular culture who are held up as masculine ideals but, in reality, deserve a restraining order – and Hot Priest certainly falls in to that pantheon. So, honestly, I’m a bit bewildered by the passion some female viewers have felt for Hot Priest. Emily Brontë definitely meant readers to like Heathcliff, as the Brontë sisters had a decidedly – shall we say – infantile concept of ideal masculinity, possibly due to drinking too much dodgy water in Yorkshire. And as for Margaret Mitchell, well, it is probably best not to look into her racial politics if you still get off on Clark Gable grinning up at Vivien Leigh.

But I am decidedly less certain that Phoebe Waller-Bridge actually meant viewers to like the Hot Priest, given that he is repeatedly shown to be – and this is the technical term – an exploitative muppet in a robe. It makes sense that Fleabag loves him because who among us has not fallen for an exploitative muppet in our time, in or out of a robe? But it makes a lot less sense to me for TV audiences to fall for him in exactly the same way. This, folks, is the distance between a character’s subjective and limited perspective and the audience’s more detatched and objective one. And because Waller-Bridge is a much more self-aware writer than Brontë and Mitchell, she mines that gap.

Yes, I get that the actor who plays the priest, Andrew Scott, is cute. But cuteness is no compensation for the priest getting a woman to confess to him and then, when she is at her most vulnerable, tearing out of the confessional box, commanding her to kneel, nearly shagging her in a church and then running off glaring at her as if she were an unforgivable strumpet. That is not, contrary to claims on social media, “hot”; that is abusive and exploitative. Sorry for dampening everyone’s priest-love, but you know I serve it to you straight round here.

But saying that the Hot Priest is a mega jerk is in no way a criticism of the show, or even of him. As I said, Hot But Horrible Men are a staple of some of the finest pop culture ever produced, and certainly of the best beloved TV shows that caused similarly Fleabag-sized hysteria in their time. Miles from This Life remains for a generation probably the ultimate Hot But Horrible Man, given that – like the priest – he desperately wanted to be a good guy, but was weak, and his weakness ended up hurting those around him, most obviously Anna, a Fleabag prototype. Whereas Hot Priest pursues Fleabag, even though he knows he’s taken (by God), Miles keeps shagging Anna even though he knows he’s taken (by boring Francesca). Unavailability is a very key component of the Hot But Horrible Man.

In many ways, a more interesting kind of unavailability comes not from an actual person (or spiritual being), but the Hot But Horrible Man’s own emotional shortcomings. A large part of Bridget Jones’s Diary’s appeal had nothing to do with dull fart Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), but Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). Not because Cleaver himself was an appealing character, but because he was one pretty much every woman on the planet has slept with at least once. Grant himself has admitted the character was not a million miles from himself. Sex and the City’s Mr Big (Chris Noth) and Mad Men’s Don Draper (Jon Hamm) also fit into this category, which can be referred to as Hot Bastards.

Despite a hairstyle that looked like Anna Wintour’s in a rainstorm, Mac in Green Wing (played by Julian Rhind-Tutt) caused similar lust in his day, his mysterious emotional unavailability proving irresistible to Caroline (Tamsin Greig) and, weirdly, female viewers.

And this is the concluding point I would like to make to you all. There is a big difference between a character falling for a Hot But Horrible Man and the audience doing likewise. Fiction, as every GCSE English paper will tell you, is about holding a mirror up to the world, and the point of Hot But Horrible Men in fiction is to warn us all away from them in real life. Consider them risk-free learning experiences, whether the writers mean us to see them that way (Waller-Bridge) or not (Brontë, Mitchell). And if a priest starts to shag you in a church after you have confessed your inner secrets, remind yourself you’re not in The Thorn Birds, and run the hell away.