By Anne Baker

Like every other girl I know, when I need relationship advice I turn to an outside party. But I don’t call my mother or send desperate texts to my friends. No, I seek solace in a wiser authority: Carrie Bradshaw.

Whenever something in my love-life appears amiss, I look to Carrie and her three fictional “Sex and the City” counterparts to help solve my relationship woes. In its six-season tenure, the show covered what to do when your potential boyfriend is bisexual, a bad kisser, a kinky sexual partner or uncircumcised, as well as dozens of other sticky situations many a modern gal has faced. But under the humor and romance, dysfunction became the major theme that dominated the series.

Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda often swallowed reality with their pink cosmopolitans, and now legions of young collegiates like myself aspire to someday walk in their very expensive shoes without a second consideration of the reality of their lives. So, I have to wonder: What is “Sex and the City” doing to us?

A quick reality check at payscale.com, a website that measures salaries, showed the average journalist living in New York City with stats similar to Carrie’s would make about $71,000 before taxes.

So let’s add this up. Carrie supposedly lives in a brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a rent-controlled apartment where she pays $780 a month (we’ll suspend our disbelief on that front for now). She then has almost $62,000 for frivolities, which she spends eagerly.

Fashionistas could spot Carrie donning designs from Chanel, Prada, Roberto Cavalli, Betsey Johnson, Versace, Dolce ‘ Gabbana, Gucci, Fendi, Marc Jacobs and Chloe, to name just a few. With each of these outfits costing more than a grand, adding in about 100 pairs of $400 shoes and no repeats, it’s safe to say Carrie should have been eating Ramen to sustain a roof over her head. But alas, she wasn’t.

“Sex and the City” is unrealistic, yes. But that doesn’t make it a bad show, and it wouldn’t be the same without all the haute couture and fancy parties. The problem is that too many women in their early 20s take Carrie’s lifestyle as truth and set their expectations too high. If you really want the chic life, pull a Miranda and be a lawyer. Sure, you’ll have to work 60-some hours a week, but when you do finally find a spare half-hour to go out and have a drink, you can afford to wear something fierce.

Call me crazy, but constantly watching “Sex and the City” will not yield positive results, and will lead the viewer to believe in a realm grounded totally in impossibility. Take, for instance, how much sex these women have. Yes, the whole point of the show is that women can have sex like men and be empowered, but having constant sex with near-strangers simply isn’t healthy, something the show almost never addresses.

Oh, no, you say, Miranda got Chlamydia in that one episode and pregnant in another. Yeah, and nothing happened to her. She suffered no negative consequences as the result of her STD and she had her baby and rode off into the sunset. Which would definitely be the case if any co-ed ended up pregnant. Definitely.

It’s not that women can’t or shouldn’t sleep with whomever they choose – they can and they should. But the show ignores some of the consequences that can come from having sex with people you don’t know and cloaks it all under the blanket of “female empowerment.” As in, “Well, I don’t know you, I don’t know if you’ve been tested, I’m not going to ask, but I’m empowered, so I’ll do it, anyway!” That’s not having sex like a man. That’s having sex like an idiot.

Women are influenced by “Sex and the City,” and they show it. In August 2006, a pre-coked-out Lindsay Lohan publicly said the show influenced how she viewed sex.

“‘Sex and the City’ changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people,” the actress reportedly said.

Lohan may be an extreme example (we all know how she turned out), but it is evidence that the show has affected how girls in our generation think about and approach sex.

I don’t suggest we all turn in our pink velvet series collections, but we should all approach “Sex” with a little more skepticism. Carrie Bradshaw and her cohorts certainly would have.