The symbol of breasts is used by Rosen to express the novel’s concerns with female identity and sexuality, and the conflict which often surrounds these ideas. Barbie’s breasts are shown to be the primary focus of the controversy and derision that she often attracts. The all-male engineering team immediately dismisses the idea of an adult-figure doll because, as Jack Ryan crudely observes, “she’s got tits” (6). During market research, mothers deem the doll’s figure “[d]isgusting” (107), revealing the wider societal resistance to a doll that reflects real female maturity. Here, breasts are symbolic of the ways adult femininity is traditionally considered either threatening and inappropriate, and/or sexuality provocative, both within the children’s toy market and in wider social interactions. The breasts are symbolic on a double level as their use in the novel as a synecdoche, or shorthand, for female identity and sexuality also reflects the ways in which breasts are used in the real world to define or control women and womanhood. The novel’s focus on Barbie’s breasts therefore symbolizes male-centric preoccupation with breasts as sexual objects and the female experience of reductive objectification.

Ruth’s fierce defense of the requirement for anatomical breasts also becomes a proxy battle for her own identity, legitimacy and creative authority, symbolizing the challenge she faces, and the theme of Female Vision and Success in a Male-Dominated Industry. As it progresses, the novel translates the symbol of breasts to Ruth’s own body, reflecting Ruth Handler’s real experience as a breast cancer survivor. Through the novel’s treatment of her mastectomy and recovery, breasts become symbolic of  female experience, vulnerability, and self-identity. Breasts come to symbolize the narrative correlation between the design of plastic breasts for commercialized child’s play and of post-operative prosthetics, highlighting their numerous and contested meanings.