Kilt Sporters vs. The Abercrombie & Fitch Boys

I am suffering from a fever. A Scottish fever. It burns, unrequited, deep in my soul. Fire licks my veins in exsquiste torment. I damn near lust after the harsh hills and alluring accents of the Highlands.

Thus, I have been reading just about anything I can get my hands on that have to do with kilt-sport'n lads and sharp-tonged lasses. This both soothes and fuels my fever. I am faced with strong, braw, honorable, righteous, die-to-protect you men with rolling brr's and bone-melting, Fabio hair. Granted, they are all fictitious and ALL are set within the 1700s or earlier, but the point is, they're fabulous.

Here's a nonfiction: I've been to Scotland within the last 10 years. The men may not wear kilts very often, or have Fabio hair, but they are all still strong, braw, honorable, righteous, and still have the instinct to kill or die for their woman/family. It's imbedded in their senses of masculinity. Must be the Pict blood. Or the Viking. Whatever.

Most of them also still have the rolling brr's that make your eyes flutter.

Uh-hghm. Anyway. . .

Why, oh why, is our substitute often an Abercrombie & Fitch Boy? You know the type. Obsessed more with clothes than most women, hair-conscious, perfectly-groomed men whose role models for masculinity are sports players, actors and other highly visible-but-not-necessarily-"masculine" men. They also love themselves more than anyone else.

Where are the men who COULD crush you with a rock or ravish you in some bushes, but don't because they KNOW what honor and tenderness is? I'd take a man who hadn't shaven in days and whose hair was mussed, and whom I could also count on without a doubt to handle the most terrible difficulties in life without flinching or losing his sense of romance any day over the Abercrombie & Fitch Boy.

Don't get me wrong. I deeply love my very American fiance (his tendency to lean towards an Abercrombie Boy notwithstanding). It's just that sometimes, I wish he'd had different models. Or he'd been born in Scotland and would proudly wear a kilt and knock the teeth out of anyone who called it a skirt.