A New York-based financier widely mentioned as a potential treasury secretary if Senator Clinton wins the presidency, Steven Rattner, may have dimmed his chances for getting the job by taking control of a pair of men’s magazines that feature scantily clad women and crass dating advice.

Earlier this month, Mr. Rattner’s private equity firm, Quadrangle Group announced that it was acquiring the American editions of Maxim and Stuff, along with a music title, Blender, for a reported $240 million.

“It’s pornography lite,” a professor of sociology, women’s, and American studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Gail Dines, said of the so-called lad mags. “They’re kind of a magazine version of ‘Girls Gone Wild.’ They straddle the mainstream market and the porn market.”
The professor said she would question putting someone who owned such outlets in a position to regulate press or broadcast companies. “Why would you want these people in key decision-making places? It’s the same reason you don’t want people who run HMOs making policy,” she said.

The prospect of Mr. Rattner being named treasury secretary is raised in the current issue of Fortune magazine. “He’s made little secret that he’d like to be secretary of the treasury,” a former colleague, Michael Wolff, wrote in Vanity Fair last month.

Mr. Rattner, a former reporter at the New York Times and managing director at Lazard Frères & Co., told the Financial Times recently that he could not see himself serving in a Clinton administration. He and his wife, Maureen White, have hosted numerous fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton and are listed by her presidential campaign as major fund-raisers, or bundlers. Mr. Rattner did not respond to a call yesterday seeking comment for this article.

A former editor at Maxim, David Itzkoff, said that at a minimum, the investment banker would be wise to put some distance between himself and the racy magazines. “If you’re looking at the possibility of a Hillary Clinton administration, those are going to be some of the most contentious confirmation hearings ever,” Mr. Itzkoff said. “Even something as benign as having the magazines in your portfolio, it could be enough of a negative that you’d want to divest yourself because you’re going into a raucous confirmation process.”

Just last week, the Israeli Consulate in New York found itself under fire for hosting a reception to pay tribute to women of the Israel Defense Force featured in a pictorial in the July issue of Maxim. One Israeli lawmaker complained that the country was seeking to revive itself as a vacation spot by encouraging “sex tourism.”

In Britain, a campaign is under way to relegate magazines such as Maxim and Stuff to the top shelf at bookstores and newsstands, alongside explicit skin magazines. The British editions of the lad mags include partial nudity, while the American versions stop just short of that.

The current issue of Maxim features a woman clad in a sheer, sea green negligee. “I love to give lap dances. But when I have a boyfriend I only give them to girls,” she declares. The latest Stuff has a quiz to help readers discern the difference between a homemade sex tape and professional porn video.

A graduate student who studied the content of lad mags, Matthew Ezzell of the University of North Carolina, said nominating Mr. Rattner could be particularly problematic for Mrs. Clinton because she is viewed as a feminist and enjoys significant support from women’s groups.

One of Maxim’s first writers, Sean Thomas, said the magazine was conceived of as a retort to aspects of the women’s movement. “When we started Maxim, we consciously felt that we were leading a fight-back against the excesses of sneering feminism,” he wrote on a British Web site, the First Post. “I believe we succeeded.”

Spokeswomen at the national and New York offices of the National Organization for Women had no comment for this article. In March, the group formally endorsed Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid.

The easy availability of hard-core pornography on the Internet and the celebration of porn stars in the mainstream press might diminish any stigma related to the magazines Mr. Rattner is buying, which are tame by comparison. “They’re crass, but I think there’s a certain amount of coarseness we’ve just come to accept in our popular culture,” Mr. Itzkoff said.

In speeches, Mrs. Clinton has complained that children are awash in images of sex and violence. Mr. Rattner has also bemoaned a trend toward vapidity in public discourse. “It’s something I feel very sad about,” he told the Financial Times in February. “The fact that people are more interested in whether Britney Spears shaves her head and goes into alcohol rehab, or what is happening at Guantanamo Bay, really is troubling to me.”

Curiously, a former Treasury Department official who is the most likely rival to Mr. Rattner for the secretary’s post, Roger Altman, has similar baggage. An online magazine, Slate, labeled Mr. Altman as a “sleaze peddler” in 1999 after his investment firm, Evercore Partners, purchased the publisher of the largest supermarket tabloids, including the National Enquirer, Star, and Weekly World News.