Blake Lively Answers All The Hard Questions In This Allure Interview

Blake Lively is no longer Serena van der Woodsen. She's graduated from her Gossip Girl days to full-on womanhood and the actress is now a mother and lifestyle entrepreneur. In a new interview with Allure, Lively has plenty of poignant things to say about womanhood.  Though the interview touches on many subjects, a recurring theme is the female experience. How do you do it all? How do you manage Hollywood's expectations of how you're supposed to look? Lively's clearly given these things some thought. For starters, she thinks all the retouching women get in photo shoots isn't  a great idea. "It is unfair,” she told Allure. “I think it’s just as frustrating to see women asked questions all the time about how they lost their baby weight and then [the media] spins that to be, ‘This is the only way.’ Or, they make it seem like, ‘You have to breast-feed and only breast-feed.’ Or, ‘You have to give birth this way versus that way.’" For Lively, the idea of women "having it all" is still a problematic conversation. “I don’t believe I have to choose — who says so? Who says we can’t do anything that we set our mind to? You may not be the best at it. You may not be the most successful. But, you can try your best. That’s what having it all means to me — not letting anyone tell me no but myself.”  For now, though, her priority is motherhood, joking that her full-time job is breastfeeding. “I’m, like, driving down the road, pumping." You can check out the full interview over at Allure.