I have always felt she doesn't like confrontation so in interviews and whatever will resort to the sort of oh dead I'm just a bit fuzzy and introverted writer. But with her childhood and her father's science background this seems a bit contrived. She cant seriously be doing this because she wants to be liked.
Also the disappointment for me is that her early book the Edible Woman which if anything made or confirmed I was a feminist was all about feminist erasure. ie a young woman trying to play the role of a gender conforming woman and realising she just couldn't.
And allowing that she could just have an amazing imagination I have always taken from that that she understood about women being made to conform by society.
I never followed her later books but wasn't troubled that she seemed to have gone off on some other journey as I felt that early book spoke about something essentially real rather than later speculative writing.
Although she always claimed that everything in the Handmaid's Tale was based on things that actually happened or were done to women.
Maybe as someone up thread has said, being primarily in the atmosphere of Canada's totally woke culture she has hit upon this old and dicredited article to explain to herself as much as anybody else why the woke culture is right.
Also disturbed to read about her support for the male academic. Some women who see themselves as equal to men dont want to accept the reality of men being predatory and women being the prey, because it would mean that they would have to accept that the men she assumes she her as equal in fact retain their patriarchal attitudes that she is lesser - for being biologically female.