A 24 yr old and a 17 yr old isn't really creepy. It's technically illegal in most places, sure, but we're essentially talking about two people who are both, functionally, children, which is a different moral category than what the word "predator" is supposed to conjure.

I used to work at a temp agency doing intake interviews for menial jobs. Warehouse stuff, data entry, the kinds of positions where the main qualification is showing up. One afternoon a guy had to disclose to me that he was a registered sex offender. He explained it pretty matter of factly.....his wife's parents had pressed charges when they were dating because she was 17 and he was in his early 20s. They were still married. They had kids. He was in his 40s at this point, sitting across a folding table from me, and the state still considered him a predator. The same woman he married. The same relationship her parents objected to.

That's not what the law was designed to protect against, and I think most reasonable people understand that even if they won't say it out loud. The law is a blunt instrument. It has to be. But "illegal" and "creepy" are doing two completely different jobs in a sentence, and collapsing them together is how we end up calling a guy a predator for having a long marriage.