Or perhaps it's just because they're smelly?

'This article considers the increasing popularity of showering in the UK. We use this case as a means of exploring some of the dimensions and dynamics of everyday practice. Drawing upon a range of documentary evidence, we begin by sketching three possible explanations for the current constitution of showering as a private, increasingly resource-intensive routine. We begin by reviewing the changing infrastructural, rhetorical and moral positioning of showering. We then consider how the multiple and contingent constituents of showering are arranged and re-arranged in and through the practice itself...'

- Abstract of ‘Explaining Showering: a Discussion of the Material, Conventional and Temporal Dimensions of Practice’, by Martin Hand, Elizabeth Shove and Dale Southerton, Sociological Research Online