I went to a lecture by Fulbeck about the project last year and these are my notes about his comments on the selection process:
"I meant to talk about the parts of the lecture addressing the selection process for the project and forgot. On being asked, Fulbeck said that to get picked, it helped to write something interesting and to be male (because 75% of the participants, all volunteers, were female) and not of Japanese ancestry (because some large percentage of the participants were). He was also asked about whether he was concerned about people fetishizing the portraits. He said yes; he had to cut the number of portraits by half, and as he, his editor, and someone else were going through the portraits with sticky dots, his editor stopped and said, "I have a confession. I haven't picked any hot girls." And it turned out they were all doing the same thing (so they went back and put a few in). Anyway, aware of the issue, but he said he didn't really know how to stop people. Which is okay as an answer, though a better one, IMO, would have been to say that he was attempting to portray people as people, which is one way to avoid fetishizing; but then he said shucks, no-one's ever fetishized me, I don't know how it feels. And then I was annoyed on gender grounds, especially since he'd made a few Mars-Venus comments previously."
no subject
"I meant to talk about the parts of the lecture addressing the selection process for the project and forgot. On being asked, Fulbeck said that to get picked, it helped to write something interesting and to be male (because 75% of the participants, all volunteers, were female) and not of Japanese ancestry (because some large percentage of the participants were). He was also asked about whether he was concerned about people fetishizing the portraits. He said yes; he had to cut the number of portraits by half, and as he, his editor, and someone else were going through the portraits with sticky dots, his editor stopped and said, "I have a confession. I haven't picked any hot girls." And it turned out they were all doing the same thing (so they went back and put a few in). Anyway, aware of the issue, but he said he didn't really know how to stop people. Which is okay as an answer, though a better one, IMO, would have been to say that he was attempting to portray people as people, which is one way to avoid fetishizing; but then he said shucks, no-one's ever fetishized me, I don't know how it feels. And then I was annoyed on gender grounds, especially since he'd made a few Mars-Venus comments previously."