Daily Inspiration Quote by Jock Sturges

Sturges reaches for biology the way a defense attorney reaches for precedent: not to shock, but to normalize. Calling Homo sapiens a "sensual species" reframes desire as an animal fact, not a moral failing or a cultural glitch. It’s a small sentence with a big ambition: to lower the temperature around looking, bodies, and pleasure by placing them in the continuum of nature. That second line - "I think all species are" - is the rhetorical escape hatch. If sensuality is broadly distributed across life, then human sensuality can’t be uniquely suspect, uniquely shameful, or uniquely incriminating.

The subtext is inseparable from Sturges’s public position as a photographer whose work has provoked fierce debates about nudity, youth, consent, and the ethics of the gaze. Read in that context, the quote isn’t just an observation; it’s a bid to shift the frame from scandal to anthropology. He’s arguing that the viewer’s panic may say more about social policing than about the body itself. At the same time, the appeal to nature is strategic and slippery. "Natural" can be a clearing, but it can also be a cover, a way to step around power dynamics that aren’t solved by evolutionary shrugging.

What makes the line work is its plainness. No manifesto, no provocation - just a calm claim that invites you to notice your own reflexes: what you call sensual, what you call obscene, and who gets to decide the difference.