The Seven Minutes  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Censorship of obscenity in the United States

The Seven Minutes is a novel by Irving Wallace on the subject of pornography and freedom of speech in the United States of the late 1960s. It is about a fictional obscenity trial of a banned book, The Seven Minutes, purported to be the thoughts in a woman's mind during seven minutes of sexual intercourse.

Although Wallace's book was originally printed in 1969, it reflects constitutional debates that rage in the post-9/11 United States. As the main character in "The Seven Minutes" considered whether to take up a defense of a sexually explicit book banned in his community, he lamented that "[w]e have placed security in a position of primacy and subordinated individual liberty to it" (p. 128, Pocket edition, 1970). He decided to defend the book because he concluded that taking away any author's right to free speech overstepped society's rights by trampling on individual civil liberties; if allowed to stand, it would be the first in a series of such injustices that would eventually mute all men, completely subverting the Bill of Rights.

Wallace's extensively researched work contains numerous (attributed) quotes and presents well-supported arguments for both sides of his fictional debate. More than 40 years later, readers of "The Seven Minutes" will recognize familiar arguments from the news today as Americans continue to debate whether governmental actions to secure public safety have encroached unconstitutionally on individual rights.

The book was made into the film, The Seven Minutes, by Russ Meyer in 1971.

Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press, who was interviewed by Wallace during research for his book, published a novel, The Original Seven Minutes, purporting to be the fictitious book described in Wallace's novel. Following legal action by Wallace, the book was withdrawn, and later repulished as The Seven Erotic Minutes with the purported author's name and all references to Wallace removed.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Seven Minutes" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools