It’s easy to hate Blake Lively. She's beautiful. She's tall. Her hair is so lush. Her skin is so smooth. She's married to a damn Marvel actor, and they have beautiful children. Her best friend is Taylor Swift. In a world of demure, close-lipped smirks, Lively has a megawatt full-teeth smile. She was born in Los Angeles and raised by a talent scout and an actor. She was a cheerleader in high school. Relative to a celebrity like Jennifer Lawrence, Lively does not seem particularly approachable or down-to-earth; she seems much more like a goddess sent to give you body dysmorphia. She's the popular girl, and always has been. But those are all reasons based in envy.
Then, of course, there are the real reasons to hate her. Lively has been in the spotlight since Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants premiered in 2005, almost two decades ago. That's a lifetime in Hollywood, and plenty of time to make mistakes that everyone can see. And Lively's actual mistakes have been bad ones. In 2012, she married Ryan Reynolds on a plantation in South Carolina, a decision she apologized for eight years later in 2020. This was, somehow, not a one-off; in 2014, Lively launched a (very short-lived) online lifestyle magazine called Preserve, which included a spread titled “Allure of Antebellum.” As Kara Brown wrote for Jezebel at the time, “Anyone who romanticizes our nation's Antebellum period as some sort of marker of style and taste is definitely white and probably an asshole.”
