I was given a Russian song as a listening exercise, and, as far as I could discern, its chorus is:
И мы не устаем, и с ночи до утра
Мы можем говорить, говорить о мужиках.
Бокал до дна в трудные минуты.
"Все мужики козлы," скажут подруги.
Translated into English, these lines are:
And we don't get tired, and all night long
We can talk, talk about men.
A full glass of wine at hard moments.
All men are billy goats, female friends will say.
Intrigued by the phrase все мужики козлы (all men are billy goats), I did some research, and it turns out it's a popular idiomatic phrase, with Google suggesting there are 216,000 web pages with that exact phrase.
Wiktionary says that козёл (a billy goat) has a second meaning:
(slang, derogatory) idiot, blockhead; jerk, bastard, ass
But it is utterly unnatural and nonsensical to say that all men are idiots or bastards in the general sense, and it appears to me that the phrase is rather about some specific inherent quality of all men that reveals itself in intergender relationships. At least, the phrase appears to be used almost exclusively in that context.
My question: What quality of all men is the phrase about, or how could you explain that phrase to a confused Japanese student who doesn't fully understand the Russian culture of intergender relationships?
UPDATE: @Quassnoi suggested in a comment below that the phrase simply means all men are jerks, and his comment received 7 upvotes. What remains unclear to me is the following thing. Google says it has much more results for the exact phrase все мужики козлы than for all men are jerks (226,000 vs 17,200). Given that the English-speaking part of the Internet is larger than the Russian-speaking one, it is clear that все мужики козлы is much more popular in Russian than all men are jerks in English is. Why is the Russian phrase much more popular than its English counterpart?
UPDATE 2: Perhaps the true English equivalent actually is all men are dicks (about 136,000 results). Still, it is considerably less popular in English than the Russian phrase is in Russian, even in absolute numbers of Google results. Adjusting the numbers of Google results for the fact that there are twice as many native English speakers as native Russian speakers (340 million vs 145 million, see this link), I estimate that все мужики козлы is about four times as popular in Russian as all men are dicks is in English. I am curious as to why it is so.