This thesis outlines a differential ontology of the Playboy Bunny/Playmate to challenge dominant interpretations of women’s representation and the construction of fantasy imagery in the famed publication. Feminist debates about women’s representation in Playboy have generally interpreted its imagery through the lens of sexual objectification or, conversely, as evidence of women’s sexual agency and liberation in the postwar era. Drawing on Kant’s ontology this project interrogates the categorical limits of these feminist accounts, which largely consist of two positions that I refer to as the “Bunny-as-object” and the “Bunny-as-subject.” I argue that the Bunny disrupts the subject-object binary insofar as she is a meticulously constructed image designed to uphold Playboy’s postwar consumerist fantasy. To move beyond this binary framework, I suggest a third ontological category for consideration: the image. This project develops a post-structuralist account of the Bunny image using the media and cultural theory of Jean Baudrillard. My study implements a semiotic approach, conducting a close visual and textual analysis of pictorials, covers, and centerfolds from Playboy’s heyday (focusing on the 1960s), to trace how the magazine’s aesthetic codes and editorial framing produce an image of Baudrillard’s third order born of the male imagination.