The verbal irony in the phrase "the magic of puberty" is that puberty brought disillusionment not magic. Moving the poem into surrealistic allegory, the final stanza completes the death of the girl's spirit as she amputates the offending nose and legs, then ties in a casket wearing "undertaker's cosmetics" and thus managing the closest resemblance to Barbie she will ever achieve. Piercy's verbal irony grows almost savage in the final lines, as fatuous onlookers in the funeral home remark that the girl is now "pretty": "Consummation at last. /To every woman a happy ending."

Piercy satirizes contemporary American society's emphasis on physical beauty as the major criterion of value for girls and women. The toy that became a twentieth-century icon of young girls' aspirations for their personal appearance is presented here as the symbol of false values that enforce stereotypical thinking about females who cannot conform to the doll's image and suffer terribly as a result. As one critic has commented, the poem is a critique of our culture's "size and weight obsession," which "as a cultural phenomenon, has moved out of the laboratory and into our literature as a thematic concern."