Oxygen, the new 24-hour cable-TV network for women founded by (among others) Oprah Winfrey and former Nickelodeon and Disney/ABC Cable president Geraldine Laybourne, is billed as a place where women can "take a breath" from the exhausting task of being female.

Being female myself, and usually exhausted, I've been tuning in since Oxygen's Feb. 2 debut to sample the network that was designed (like Ice Blue Secret) especially for me. And this is what I've seen:

• "Pajama Party," a talk show where the host, guests and on-stage audience, all grown women, are wearing pajamas and giggling about boys 'n' stuff;
• "We Sweat," which is not a deodorant commercial, but a show about women's sports;
• "Oprah Goes Online," in which Winfrey and her minion, Gayle King, learn all about that Internet thingie in 12 easy lessons;
• "Pure Oxygen," a live, midday clone of ABC's "The View," featuring celebrity interviews, astrology forecasts, newsy tidbits, relationship, health, fashion and money advice, a daily "water cooler" topic and a DJ named Monica who takes us into commercials with a snippet of music and the reminder to "take a breath;"
• "Trackers," a late afternoon teenage girl version of "Pure Oxygen;"
• "Inhale," a morning yoga show;
• "Exhale," a prime-time talk show where a very serious Candice Bergen interviews guests like Naomi Judd and Grace Slick on a pillow-strewn, flower-laden estrogen-chic living-room set;
• and a brand-new version of the hoary game show "I've Got a Secret," which has nothing to with women, per se, but fills up airtime, so what the heck.

Across the bottom of the screen, in the space where ESPN runs scores and CNBC runs stock quotes, Oxygen runs the e-tail addresses of its sponsors.

And after all this Oxygenating, I have come to a perplexing conclusion: I am not woman enough for this women's cable network. I mean, I'm not much of a shopper, I never read my horoscope and I was miraculously able to find the Internet without Oprah's help. I haven't been to a pajama party since ninth grade. I would rather watch a hockey fight -- in fact, I would rather be in a hockey fight -- than watch anything called "We Sweat." I think Naomi Judd is a babbling idiot.

Watching Oxygen, there were times when I actually did have to "take a breath" -- from the sheer, overwhelming, insulting girliness of it all. I reached my breaking point somewhere between the "Pajama Party" segment where the bride-to-be had a bronze mold of her butt made as a gift for her fiance and the documentary about the woman who draws the comic strip "Cathy." So much for my notoriously high tolerance for brain-sucking vapidity.

Oxygen, which is synergistically united with Oxygen.com (a collection of women-aimed Web sites), is very well funded -- Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and AOL are among its major investors. But, so far, funding hasn't resulted in clout; Oxygen is still fighting for space on cable systems, reaching only 7 million to 10 million homes (it's unavailable in New York City and parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco), in contrast to its venerable women's cable rival Lifetime, which reaches 75 million homes. And it hasn't resulted in compelling programming, either. Oxygen is relying mainly on in-house talk and infotainment shows augmented by "interactive" segments where the TV hosts take email questions from viewers in real time. You can get the same exciting visual effect by setting up an armchair in the middle of your office and watching your co-workers type.

Oxygen is a depressing jumble of retro stereotypes and empty "You go, girl!" solidarity. And it's absolutely obsessed with body image. On Feb. 10 and 11, for example, I took down the following program notes: The animated block "X-Chromosome" (actually the most original and impressive of Oxygen's programming) showed "Fat Girl," a cartoon about a sassy, large-and-in-charge woman who clashes with her mean, stick-figure female boss, and "Bitchy Bits," in which a woman grumbled and bitched her way through a bathing suit shopping expedition. Bergen had a show about teenage girls and self-esteem, which included much talk of eating disorders and the entertainment industry's notion of beauty. There was the aforementioned "Cathy" documentary (more bathing suit shopping!), and the "Pajama Party" segment where host Katie Puckrick poked fun at dieting-obsessed women who are afraid to eat. And "Pure Oxygen" had a plus-size lingerie fashion show. Yes, many women have food and weight issues. But Oxygen's schizo attitude ("It's cool to be fat!"; "I hate myself in a bathing suit!") is doing nobody any favors; it just reinforces viewers' love-hate affairs with their bodies.

Caryn Mandabach, who executive produced "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne" and is one of Oxygen's founding partners (with Laybourne, Winfrey and TV execs Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner), has been quoted as saying that "men watch TV with one hand down their pants and the other on the control," but that "women watch TV with a Krispy Kreme in one hand and a martini in the other and they don't need a remote control." Let's take a breath and ponder that image, shall we? What makes the Oxygen viewer on her chenille sofa pounding down martinis and donuts any more highly "evolved" (to use a favorite Oxygen buzzword) than the guy in the La-Z-Boy watching Comedy Central's "The Man Show" in a happy Bud-and-Doritos stupor?

There's no difference, of course; Oxygen and jokily chauvinistic shows like "The Man Show" and FX's "The X Show" are niche programming at its most nakedly opportunistic. And Laybourne is unquestionably a niche-programming genius, having invented Nickelodeon, the arbiter of all that is cool, hot, funny, gross, smart, dumb and, above all, desirable in the pre-teen world. On Nickelodeon, with rare exception, girls and women are portrayed as smarter than, more resourceful than and generally superior to boys and men. And that "girls rule, boys drool" brand of schoolyard feminism makes its nyah-nyah presence felt all over Oxygen and Oxygen.com. (Actually, the young-skewing "Trackers" and "X-Chromosome" might have made the core of a more viable cable network than Oxygen -- a network for young, post-Nickelodeon women.)

For example, the "People" page of Oxygen.com, which contains press bios of Laybourne and her partners, looks like the high school yearbook blurb you'd write in a daydream about being queen of the world. The bio for "Gerry" tells us that we can "trust her" because "She gets it," and quotes Laybourne's vision for Oxygen: "The center of women's lives isn't expensive cars and designer clothes. The center of their life is managing all their roles." Mandabach's bio flatters her thusly: "Famously wacky. Vivacious. Intense. Fast. Long committed to yoga. A great dresser." As for Werner, we are assured that "he loves women and knows they're smarter than men."

That vanity-plate page crystallized something I'd begun to suspect watching Oxygen's clueless programming. For all its "we celebrate you" crap, Oxygen is a monument to conformity. Laybourne pays lip service to the many roles women play, but Oxygen is really only interested in one of those roles: shopper. Oxygen commiserates, in sisterly clichis, with a phantom woman-consumer, telling her over and over that she's in charge yet stretched thin, strong yet in need of a place to collapse, appreciated yet taken for granted. The network is like a pep rally in reverse, exhorting women to give three cheers if they're miserable. And what do women do when they're miserable? Shop!

In its own way, Oxygen is as separatist as "The Man Show." Can't we all just get along? But more damning than that, it's superfluous. "Who is the most underserved audience?" Laybourne asked rhetorically in a recent New York Times profile. "Women, of course." In what universe? Lately, it seems as if TV is serving no one but women, morning ("The View," "Later Today"), noon (Oprah, the soaps, Rosie O'Donnell) and night ("Providence," "Judging Amy," "Ally McBeal," "Once and Again" and the rest of the flock of chick shows).

In all my hours of Oxygen viewing, I saw almost nothing that surprised or engaged me -- no domestic insight as harsh and true as what's offered every week on "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "The Sopranos" (one woman posted on HBO's "Sopranos" bulletin board that, "It's the only show my husband and I sit down and watch together"), no contemplation of female power as complicated and daring as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," no girl-talk show as witty and audacious as "Sex and the City." I did see plenty of earnest Oprah-style confessionalism, though, and designer spirituality, and teeny-tiny morsels of news you can use -- this is women's culture as advertiser-friendly and passi as "I Am Woman" (which, tellingly, was used as the theme song in Oxygen's TV commercial).

And everywhere, everywhere on Oxygen, I heard the same divisive, battle-of-the-sexes bull they use on "The Man Show," except without the humor. On Oxygen, clichis about men are repeated as if they're undisputed gender fact: Men don't listen, men don't talk, men fear intimacy, men are slobs, yada yada yada. If this is Oxygen's idea of evolution, give me ESPN.