Editor's note: This column contains detailed sexual references.

I love men, so sweet, you know, and so helpful. Like the way they rush to stow your overhead carry-on when you get on the plane. "Let me get that for you," they say.

My patient husband is always ready, even at 3 a.m., to kill a scurrying centipede with a can of Raid. The wise advice he gives me would apply to almost any situation. "The thing is to stop screaming," he says.

My feminism is all about equal rights. Men and women are different, and equal. But aren't men handsome in their suits and ties. Awww! What flaws we women overlook for men's amenability, their willingness to wear the clothes we buy them because sartorial esthetics is not their thing. Men are so different. This is annoying, enraging even, but what passionless woman would fall in love with a clone? That's why the song's called Strangers in the Night. These people are strange.

And the mystifying things they do! The way a male boss will pass you a slip of paper with your new salary written on it because it transgresses the code to say numbers aloud. A woman would just tell you the number. And I treasure that blank look men give you when you ask them the really deep questions. "Why don't men dye their hair when it turns gray?"

"Why would I do that," is what I know they're thinking. "I am a man. I am me. Who cares what colour my hair is? Work around it." But men are smart enough not to say things like that out loud any more. I truly don't know why women see themselves as an artwork in progress, but men are happy to remain a figure in a war monument, a guy leaning into the wind with a rifle and a canteen. Men never change. The gender may weather a bit but you get what you came for.

Seconds on radio

I only mention this because I was on a CBC radio program last week called The Point, in which I and several men discussed, well, the point. Was hockey player Sean Avery punished excessively by the NHL for publicly referring to his ex-girlfriend as "sloppy seconds?"

I was warmed by the unity of the group. We agreed it was hypocritical in the NHL world, which is misogynist by nature, to ban Avery for six games. I even defended Avery, saying I didn't think his remark was extreme, especially compared to what this hopeless thug regularly says to players and female fans. The guy was just hurt, I said.

Done and dusted.

Flash forward to that evening. I read a kind message on my CBC e-mail from a woman listener who agrees with me about the Supreme Court's EI decision. Er, just between you and me, she wrote, you do realize that Avery's phrase refers to "a woman's vaginal opening being enlarged by having multiple sexual partners."

Huh?

I stormed (I really did) into the living room where my husband was sitting. "Stephen," I said. "Does 'sloppy seconds' mean 'a woman's vaginal opening being enlarged by having multiple sexual partners'?"

"No, I believe it refers to having sex with someone when there's semen in the vagina that is previous, so to speak…"

"Oh is it," I said. "And you let me tell a national radio audience that it was kind of sweet to refer to your ex that way?"

"What did you think it meant?"

"I THOUGHT IT MEANT CHRISTMAS DINNER LEFTOVERS! I THOUGHT IT MEANT TURKEY, MASHED POTATOES AND GRAVY THE NEXT DAY! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME IT MEANT SEX PUDDLES?"

"But when you told me that you thought the Avery thing was a big overreaction, I just assumed you were being very liberated. As you usually are."

What do men want?

As it turns out, I still don't think Avery's remark was extreme. But that is because I do not understand men. Here's the thing. Men never turn down sex. Remember that line from Frasier, when Daphne says men sometimes use sex to get what they want? Frasier explodes: "How can we possibly use sex to get what we want? Sex is what we want!"

So if you're telling me that men think a beautiful woman like Avery's ex is lesser because she has "form," well, dream on. If we're going to get technical about this — and this kind of informed intellectual analysis is what I live to deliver — who put that semen in there to begin with? A man. And why does it hang around? There are whole libraries on this subject; male sperm are fighting a pitched upstream battle to make that baby. The fight is slower and more intricate than scientists first realized — it's the Russians and Americans racing for a sexual Berlin — and if anyone thinks they don't want to participate or indeed win, this is not why we have six billion-ish humans on earth.

Of course, if you say this on a live CBC Radio show, you don't get invited back. It's just as well that I am only now informing listeners that the feminist commentator on The Point whom they thought was pretty cool was in fact thinking, "Personally, I like leftovers. Isn't Christmas dinner better on Boxing Day, when you can mix up the dinner remains and eat them in front of Bad Santa? Avery's dead wrong on this."

Conversational leftovers

Things are pretty fraught around the house right now. It was weird telling my husband to assume he's married to some kind of reverse hick who's so laissez-faire about sex that she can't even understand why men think "sloppy seconds" is a slur, but who nevertheless wants the simplest slang fully explained to her from now on so she doesn't make a public prat of herself a second time. Of course things had already been tense. They always are at Christmas. We had an argument about, of all things, potpourri. He had an opinion, and it wasn't just that I disagreed with it: I don't think husbands have a right to an opinion about a bag of cinnamon-scented leaves, berries and stupid pinecones made in Arkansas that Holt Renfrew no longer sells so you have to hunt for it in outlet malls like some kind of deranged Little Rockian.

But I went as overboard on potpourri as Avery did on his semen. So I shut down debate. I prorogued, possibly using a closed door similar to the Governor General's.

Then my husband said something terrible to me, so terrible that it silenced me, which is new.

"You are just like Stephen Harper." That is what he said.

He's trying to make a joke of it now. "Appointed any senators yet?" he says as he brings my morning coffee.

But I am not laughing, and won't be for some time to come. It's a woman thing. A decade from now, he'll remark on a former prime minister's fate, and chuckle. And I'll remember "Aromatique" and something about a hockey player and reheated next-day fowl, a Christmas fable that rankles for no reason I can now recall.