. . . no, the pathetic thing is that the model for what it means to be a woman living in New York is the creation of a misogynistic gay man:

[Name redacted so as to mitigate obvious over-the-top self-promotion], who is 27, came to New York soon out of Georgetown University four years ago. Along with many of her peers, she was drawn in part by HBO’s comic but near-anthropological chronicle of the living and mating habits of a certain set of New York’s single women.

Ms. [redacted] knows the adventures and misadventures of Carrie & Company by heart, and she uses them as something of a road map for her own life.

She frequents sleek and buzzworthy bars with her girlfriends. She has danced at Bungalow 8, the celebrity-rich club in West Chelsea. She has devoured cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, and she can sprint in five-inch heels. And, of course, she has written publicly about relationships, both for Time Out New York and on a blog of her own, among other places, with all that entails.

Ms. [redacted] has taken her devotion to “Sex and the City” further than most. She dated a onetime boyfriend of Candace Bushnell, whose column in The New York Observer inspired the television series. For the British version of the magazine Marie Claire, Ms. [redacted] analyzed how her life compares to the lives lived in the series.

“If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today,” Ms. [redacted] says with no hint of self-consciousness, “she would be me.”

Ms. [redacted] may be extreme. But she is hardly alone.

It has been a decade since “Sex and the City” arrived on television, yet the adventures of Carrie and her pals continue to enthrall. This spring, even as Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the series, turns 43, the “Sex and the City” movie will make it to the big screen. Although the film won’t officially arrive in theaters until May 30, Carrie fever is running so high that the publicity campaign began almost the moment plans for the movie were announced.

Yet young women coming to New York these days in search of Mr. Big, or at least the perfect Cosmopolitan, are finding that money and technology have altered the urban paradise that Carrie inhabited.

The city has become such an expensive playground that much of what Carrie and her friends took for granted — a Manhattan apartment, taxis for any trip longer than a half-dozen blocks, dinner at the newest four-star restaurants — is no longer easily in reach of a young woman on a budget, much less a young woman on a writer’s budget.

. . .

Alyssa Shelasky, another New Yorker who tried to follow in Carrie’s footsteps, discovered just how fast one’s fortunes could rise and fall on the Web two summers ago, when she was asked by Glamour magazine to write a blog about finding love again after a particularly heart-rending breakup.

The blog made it tougher.

“Men were freaked out by it,” Ms. Shelasky said the other day over coffee and a brownie at City Bakery on 18th Street.

With long, soft brown hair framing her open face, Ms. Shelasky has a down-to-earth, girl-next-door quality. But it is hard to be the girl next door when you’ve also been the girl about town on the Internet.

“Within five minutes on the computer,” she said, “men could find out everything I had done the night before and the night before, and that this guy did this and it really turned me on.”

In many respects, Ms. Shelasky is Carrie rewritten for the Internet age. “If I didn’t like a guy or never called him back,” she recalled, “a few childish men in particular would use the blog to retaliate.

“They would be like, ‘This is Sneakers Guy, we made out, and she was like this,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wait, this is my blog, and I get to decide how much of me we discuss.’”