Is this totally impossible, fictional scenario sexual assault?

[Kyla]

@delphica

What was the main character doing, I assume in the teenage kid’s body, all this time while this was going on?

He was. I think that was why this episode exists at all - the writers were like “WON’T IT BE FUNNY TO MAKE SAM BE IN HIGH SCHOOL HAHAHAHA”. (It wasn’t.) Also, fans have been clamoring for a body-switch episode for years. But they wanted a switch of the two main characters. The fans and the writers of Supernatural have a strange and occasionally adversarial relationship (the show misplaced its fourth wall awhile ago, making it possible for the show to tease its own fans; I think it’s pretty hilarious, but other people have taken it very, very badly), so I think part of this was just the writers’ way of fucking with the fans.

And switching over to whether the woman was a victim … does the woman know the main character, and did this impact her decision to have sex with him?

Nope, she didn’t know him at all. It was totally a one-night stand.

[Miller]

@Malthus

Disagree. It isn’t a necessary element of the crime that the person’s mind be “there” during the assault for it to “count” as a crime. You can, for example, sexually assault the comatose, which is as close in the real world as you can get to this scenario, and there is no suggestion that this is not a crime, or that the crime is not one of sexual assault.

Sure, that’s as close as you can get in the real world. Problem is, it’s still pretty far away from what happened in the TV show. I’d say that being comatose, and being mind-swapped, are sufficiently distinct states that we can’t really apply the legal reasoning from one to the other. The real world legal system doesn’t account for the location of an individual’s personality, because it can only ever exist in that person’s body. In the universe described by the show, the personality is an identifiably discrete and removable unit within the human body. An unconscious person, in the show’s universe, presumably still possess the same “self” unit that defines their personality. They are still verifiably “there” even if they’re asleep, drugged, or comatose. This is entirely different from the personality being removed and placed elsewhere, to the extent that we’d need a new body of law to cover such situations. If we treated them as analogous, drugging someone into unconsciousness would be the equivalent of removing their mind entirely, and that’s clearly not an adequate legal solution to the issue.

[jackdavinci]

Well he was the secondary villain of the episode.

No it’s not rape or sexual assault. It’s something else that we don’t have terminology for because it hasn’t been invented yet. But yes it’s wrong, maybe as wrong or wronger than rape or sexual assault, and you could probably find some judge somewhere willing to shoehorn it into some already existing category even though some new legislation really should be passed to deal with it.

Then there’s Stargate Universe, where everyone gets really cavalier with their borrowed bodies…

[Chronos]

I should start by saying it feels like sexual assault to me … but then I was thinking, would I still think that way if the teenage kid got the new body, and then spent the week jerking off like a madman? Is it MORE assault-like because it involved another person?

Something like this happened in an episode of Farscape, where getting hit by a malfunctioning alien weapon caused the main characters to swap minds. Crichton, while he was in Aeryn’s body, spent some time with his/her shirt open and watching his/her breasts jiggling, and it’s implied that Aeryn, while she was in Crichton’s body, masturbated (she says after the fact, “…I was in your pants”). It’s not entirely analogous, though, given that, first, the switching wasn’t caused by any of the main characters themselves, and second, neither of them had any objection to how the other was using their body (well, Aeryn did, briefly, but it seemed to be mostly that she was caught by surprise by it).

[Miller]

Oh, man, there’s a whole 'nother can of worms: if having sex while body-swapped is sexual assault, what about masturbation?

Or, how about this: if I swap bodies with an observant Jew and eat a ham sandwich, is he still kosher?

[Kyla]

@Miller

Or, how about this: if I swap bodies with an observant Jew and eat a ham sandwich, is he still kosher?

People are never kosher.

[Chronos]

And the Jewish Law is concerned only with volitional acts, anyway. A person can’t be guilty of something that happened against his will.

[Grumman]

@Anaamika

I thought about this. The crime is in the pimply teenager switching the bodies in the first place. If this happened by accident, if I was in someone else’s body by accident, then no, how could it be sexual assault? What am I supposed to do? What if I think it’s permanent, as someone said, or even say a year? Am I supposed to just deny myself for all of that time because it’s someone else’s body? No. As long as my consciousness is in it then it’s MY body.

If you have switched bodies with someone else, I’d say you have a moral obligation to treat it well. Considering you know exactly where the owner is and how to contact them, there’s no excuse for not seeking their permission if you’re that set on fucking someone.