Like any place in the world, there is harassment in EU Brussels. Twice a year about 800 young women and men get a 5-month traineeship at the European Commission. Stagiaires are ‘…well known in Brussels for their ill-fitting suits, inflated sense of self-importance and hovel-like abodes. They can often be found in the corners of cheap bars sipping shared Coca-Colas through straws.’ ….in the words of one commentator.

These stagiaires mostly get chosen for their brains, but not always. An official once wrote that most of them are ‘...young and attractive ladies’ and that they ‘… end up working with old and ugly officials.’  The official wrote, ‘Oh sweet Little Stagiaires, you really are the sunshine in the darkness of the Commission; the adrenaline who keeps alive scores of old naughty officials.’ 

Unfortunately, he also noted that ‘…sexual harassment is common’ and that some Commission officials ‘…will try to offer a more permanent position later in exchange of some, well you know.’ Referring to his colleagues he writes of ‘…old pricks taking advantage of their position to act perversely’, and that ‘…the EC doesn’t do shit about it.’

Around the same time as ‘me-too’, an EU staffer published a letter in the Commission’s staff newsletter responded to the idea of setting up a singles club among the EU staff. The man wrote that because there are more single women than men, ‘a singles group would largely consist of unmarried and divorced females pushing 40 and 50, with the occasional predatory, sociopathic or gold-digging male’.  He suggests that polygamy is the answer: ‘females in Western societies are incredibly and incurably self-centred when it comes to sharing their partners with other, less fortunate women’.