>>30115
Crippling? Probably not. But the chances of trauma are probably much higher for children, given how of their self worth comes from others (which is natural and good, from an evolutionary point of view). For example, when the pedo decides to be an asshole and drop out of their lives when they are no longer attractive. Going through puberty and the teenage years is already hard without the body image issues caused by someone leaving one because you were no longer attractive (or really, even if they didn't abandon them, there would probably be less physical intimacy, which would be just as bad coming from someone they love and respect).
>And if relationships between adults and children were somewhat common, those sorts of feelings would become increasingly rare as society in general would stop viewing us as monsters.
You are right that such feelings would become less likely and less damaging, but that's a chicken and egg problem. No one would expose their children to potential harm by de-ostrisizing pedophilia, and that harm can't be mitigated until the pedophilia of it is de-ostrisized.
>Such feelings can be dealt with reasonably easily.
I'll respond to this last, because my reply has gotten so out of hand. Such feelings are not easily dealt with. People often go their entire lives with emotional baggage from old lovers. This is compounded by the fact that all are unique, with their own desires and dreams and feelings. Reality is black and white. Even in the hardest of sciences, it's a fuzzy, dark world that changes when you look away, interpretable only through bias-laden theories that can at best be generated locally and statistically, praying to every God you know you are approaching a universal truth. And dealing with human behavior is even worse, as logic and rationality don't always apply, and when they apply isn't rational. (The pretension that it is not while carrying all the authority of (capital-s) Science is precisely why psychology is so dangerous.)
I am having a hard time trying to say what I mean without dragging whole philosophical frameworks into this to use as a background of discussion.
For a better example, I think we can agree that in general, people usually try to raise their children as best as they know how, love them, and try to protect them (at least, within the values paradigm of the society they live in). I think we can agree that this is true for all societies. And yet, most people resent their parents to a varying degree about something. It is completely possible, and I'd argue probably, for the pedophile to do everything right, and the child still be harmed in at least some cases.