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'At noon the mistress of the house puts her head in her favorite girl-slave's lap; the slave strokes with her fingers her mistress's loosened hair, touches the hair-roots, fondles the scalp and creates a little cracking sound with the nails of the thumb and the third finger. This causes a pleasant sensation in the mistress's whole body which makes her swoon with delight comparable to an orgasm…'
Bastide states that he was less interested in the description of this old Brazilian custom, described by two European travellers early in the nineteenth century, than in the emotional reaction of the two travellers. Both expressed strong aversion and disgust. Malinowski has described a similar custom among children and loving couples in Northwest Melanesia.
Bastide's interpretation starting with the symbolic equation, head=genitalia, mentions the infantile sexual significance of hair, and then asks how it can be that this behavior developed in Brazil to a socially accepted custom among adult women. It becomes understandable when one takes into consideration the life which the white woman lived in the colonial period in Brazil. The women married at the age of 12 or 13, were entirely left to their husbands' tyranny and were spied upon by husband, in-laws, and hundreds of native slaves. They were confined to their houses, their husbands made love to the young slave girls before their eyes, and a strict, religious up-bringing all combined to make sexual satisfaction nearly impossible for white women. The Cafuné probably developed as a substitutive sexual satisfaction which was tolerated because its sexual character was extragenital.