Over the course of the next year, Fonda’s politics only became more pronounced. She allowed the Black Panthers to use her New York condo as a meeting place; she announced plans to launch an investigation of Vietnam war crimes; she was arrested on drug smuggling charges in Cleveland. The “drugs” were vitamins, but the arrest highlighted just how much of a menace Fonda had become to the American government. She sold her home and her wardrobe; she fasted in Colorado and declared herself “a revolutionary.” She only stopped protesting long enough to play a call girl in the feminist masterpiece Klute, earning her second Best Actress nomination in three years. The va-va-voom hair had already been shorn in 1968 for They Shoot Horses, but now Fonda sported a distinctive shag — what we’d call a mullet — maintained, according to reports, by a male barber. She wore a shapeless military coat and pantsuits; she traveled to Vietnam to experience firsthand what the men of her generation were experiencing, eventually earning her the moniker of “Hanoi Jane.”

The Cool Girl had gone rogue, and the world soured on her accordingly. Fonda had embraced sex, sure, but she’d always been a tomboy. In the early ‘60s, the outspokenness and rejection of norms of femininity had made her seem a bit madcap and awesome; taken to its natural extension, she became an unruly, un-American woman — and most certainly not “cool.” Between 1971 and 1977, every film she touched flopped, and she gradually became the signifier for the misguided and ultimately impotent aims of the New Left. Her image would only be rehabilitated in the 1980s with a hard swing to the right, a marriage to one of the least cool capitalists, and an embrace of aerobics. The Cool Girl, then, turned Soccer Mom.

***

We’d like to think of “cool” as connotative of something progressive, even radical. But Cool Girls are neither, at least not precisely. We love them because they seem to offer an alternative to the polished, performative femininity visible in both our stars and our peers. Because they “don’t give a shit”; because they don’t truck with the regulations and rules of dating and mean-girling that prove so infuriating. But to be “cool” is to tread a fine line between something different, something almost masculine, but never anything too masculine, or assertive, or independent. The Cool Girl can talk about poop, and video games, and eating Doritos, because those things are ultimately benign: Even with her short hair, Jennifer Lawrence still has the body and the face and the wardrobe that conforms to dominant beauty ideals.

We say we want to be Jennifer Lawrence’s BFF, but what does that mean? Like Bow, and Lombard, and early Fonda, she’d be so incredibly fun. But would she challenge us to think differently about ourselves or the world? And if — or when — she does, will we still like her so much?

We dispose of even our most beloved female stars with startling swiftness, changing celebrity best friends the way 7-year-olds switch real ones. The Cool Girl will stay safe, but what does our swift embrace and rejection of its proxies communicate about our standards for women in the actual world?