Not long afterward, one commenter wrote, “Evil Bitchweed.” Another taunted, “Hey Amy ... C U Next Tuesday,” an evocation of that C-word, again. When some commenters complained that the image of Ms. Harmon was inconsonant with the values of a group espousing progressive activism, FDN defended it as “satire, not sexism.”

So a few journalists get heckled, you may be thinking. Why should we care? Here’s why: This kind of vitriol is not designed to hold reporters accountable for the fairness and accuracy of their work. Instead, it seeks to intimidate and, ultimately, to silence female journalists who write about controversial topics. As often as not, even if they’ve won two Pulitzers, as Ms. Harmon has, these women find their bodies — not their intellects — under attack.

“When I first saw it, I felt a flush of embarrassment — even though it wasn’t really my body, or my bathing suit,” Ms. Harmon told me. She said colleagues of both genders commiserated. Many had received their own hate mail in the past: death threats, for example, or anti-Semitic missives. But for the men, at least, their bodies weren’t part of the conversation. The FDN attack, Ms. Harmon said, was “a kind of visual shorthand that can’t really be used in the same way to dismiss or demean a male reporter.”

“The intention is ‘Shut up!’ and it has a chilling effect,” says Joanna Pearlstein, deputy managing editor at Wired. Last March, Ms. Pearlstein wrote an info-graphic about ammunition whose headline read, in part, “If you want to stop gun violence, start with bullets.” When it was posted online, she was labeled a “skank whore” and told that she came “across like a 40-year-old virgin giving sex advice.” And there was worse that can’t be repeated here.

Emily Graslie, of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, hosts a science-themed video channel on YouTube called “The Brain Scoop.” In one episode last November, she went through her inbox, finding numerous references to her body, her face and her relative hotness (“I’d still totally do her!” wrote one viewer). She wondered whether this kind of sexualized feedback could explain why there weren’t more women doing what she does: reporting on the so-called STEM topics of science, technology, engineering and math.