Fifteen Years of Raymi the Minx
Raymi The Minx is the alter ego of Lauren White, or is it the other way around? Raymi is a young thirty something Internet pop culture diva, Toronto events blogger, artist and homemade sex symbol. She began blogging about her life in the year 2000, at the tender age of seventeen, back before anyone had ever heard of ‘web logging’, and after fifteen years and many ups and downs, Raymi the Minx has touched thousands of people, in one way or another…
“It’s Raymi’s job to be desired by strangers” is an actual quote from Lauren White. The Urban Dictionary defines ‘minx’ as a cheeky or mischievous girl. “You are such a minx!” A description provided by Cuddly Minx on March 31, 2005, which was five years after Lauren started blogging as Raymi the Minx, a word she claims to have smithed herself from mink and lynx. And really there’s no question Lauren was the first digital minx, and in her mind a minx is a sexually mischievous girl.
But wait a minute, how is being a minx a job?
Raymi the Minx pays Lauren White’s bills, and indeed that is kind of remarkable. Lauren pumps out about three or four Raymi adventures a week, and dozens of daily updates on all her platforms for thousands of combined readers worldwide. She has run ads, used CafePress, and done paid assignments. Today she works as a freelance PR girl, consultant, model…wrestling ring card girl. In essence, she makes a decent living dodging the nine to five, and that’s interesting all by itself. “Raymi is a small to medium sized opportunity magnet. But so much fools Gold’, Lauren laughs.
Over the years, Lauren has been in dozens of movies, music videos, burlesque troupes, numerous art exhibits as she dabbles in painting and is now writing her third book – a sexy one. A great many things in her life are free, or heavily subsidized by brands, and ‘Little Raymis’, which are copy cat bloggers and admirers. So she lives a kind of cash-free existence with money in the bank. And as you can probably imagine, after fifteen years doing this, she has a huge Rolodex of important people, publicists, celebrities and patrons of her arts. Followed by an equally lengthy array of haters, stalkers and media exploiters. She really is the Canadian internet’s first digital life super test model and the experiment continues.
As a sponsorship vehicle, Raymi the Minx is better suited to edgier brands, tattoos and exotic liquors, singles dating apps, boxing gyms, sporting goods, sexy lingerie, designer swimsuits like Bathing Belle swimwear in Toronto, handmade jewelry and that sorta thing. Here’s Lauren out front of Mint laser hair removal clinic in Liberty Village Toronto in the summer 2015 after she put her whole bikini area hair removal treatment on Instagram. Not many chick bloggers would do that. Later that afternoon she went shopping with a friend, another blogger who had gift cards to stores in Liberty Village. He bought Raymi drinks before whisking her away somewhere else, to some other party, and all because of her blog, and her forte personnalité on social media.
Fifteen Year Rollercoaster Called Raymi the Minx
More dramatic than the average girl’s ride through life, Raymi the Minx’s roller coaster has had some Rocky Mountain heights and Grand Canyon depths, with the sharpest twists and turns yet to come…
It all started back in the year 2000. Fifteen years ago, at age 17, a sexually precocious teen girl in Streetsville began posting messages on a VICE magazine’s Wassup Forum as Raymi The Minx and immediately gained a following. In light of this success a mentor of Raymi’s that she met on that forum advised her to start a ‘blog’ on Blogger.com. At age 18, in 2001 Lauren moved to New York City to intern / bartender for VICE magazine. Both jobs effectively ended on Sept 11th, and she left NYC in October to work and save money in Canada so she could live in Maine for three months where she had a brief radio show entitled, There’s Something About Raymi. The remote location became too much for her, and so she moved to Toronto where her blog really blew up. Lauren secretly worked as a webcam model and her fast life was soon beginning to spiral down the drain from the good times, and the enabling, using friends surrounding the Raymi / Lauren phenomenon. So she fled from Toronto to California for a month. At age 20, Raymi’s blog traffic tripled again. She was living in Los Angeles longboarding on Manhattan beach, and she was so close to her dreams, or so she thought, but was in fact flying too close to the sun. “I was so stupid back then” she whispers, “I did it all wrong and no one was nurturing me, this movement I thought I was spearheading”. The roller coaster plunged downward and the tween finally snapped. Downtime was spent afterward over a significant period of time residing in Oakville and then Lauren got her groove back. This period in her life she refers to as, “Six Months in Mansions,” dating a bad boy of the town at the time she also notes this period of her life fondly as one of the best times of her life. The glory days. Then she met her to-be fiance and spent five years blogging their entire relationship leading up to a brief engagement which ended cataclysmically. During this period, Raymi won several notable first place blog awards.
Many things changed in the world for web loggers in 2003, as Pyra was acquired by Google, and eventually advertising-supported Blogspot and Blogger Pro emerged. Raymi predates all that, and so she can comfortably say she is today the most popular blogger in Canada since 2000, which she infamously got called out for, and and courageously defended on MTV Creeps. But to her credit, Raymi pioneered many platforms. She was taking selfies straight to her blog in 2002, and she tackled the foodie niche and posted half eaten meals long before anyone else, and appeared nude on Naked News and got SWAG from Playboy.
I met Raymi the Minx in 2008 when I needed bloggers to write about Second City comedy clubs and Alliance Atlantis movies, and she was a good choice because her blog was old and trusted even back then, and she had lots of target demographic readers coming in through links from sites like Buzznet, Friendster, Clubzine and other pop culture portals of that time. It was just before she was written up in Globe & Mail which may or may not have been as a direct result of her infamous breakup blues post ‘And So’.
In 2010, I had the pleasure of watching Lauren’s presentation at ‘Blog Stars’, where she stood in front of the audience and rapidly scrolled back through her most recent blog content. ‘This is how people read my blog’ she announced.. “They just glance over the pictures, pausing to read text here and there, and when they see something interesting, like Raymi’s new guy..” she explained, lingering over the image of a man on a motorcycle, “they of course wonder if we’re having sex’. The audience laughed, and Raymi scrolled down until she found another shot of the guy in bed, “…and they make their own judgments”. What she was saying is that what people see in the pictures shapes how they perceive the text, and vice versa. Less is more, and it makes her occasional rants more meaningful. This is Raymi style, and you can still see it on her blog today.
As blogging matured it had a mini golden age from 2008 to 2012 before Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr made micro blogging more popular. Those four years were also something of a golden age for Raymi the Minx and the various other bloggers in a Toronto based circle, which Lauren mentored. Unlike the other writers, her posts are edgy and over time advertisers turned away from her NSFW content. What does that mean? When she shows off her breasts, and even her bottom, it’s considered Not Safe for Work, and turns off potential sponsors, but of course this tactic radically increases readership, or should I say viewership.
After fifteen years, Raymi’s bent even darker today..
“I’m not really dating right now. I have my little manpile that I ignore of course…I find it just complicates things. I’d rather work on my book and myself although it does get lonely. I feel empty. I’d like more meaning in my life. But I get ticked off by men who invite, demand or expect me to come to their little events / parties as some kind of trophy-date for them, with zero regard for who I am as a human, my timeline, or life.”
It’s entirely possible that history will remember Raymi the Minx because she was the first real Canadian teen blogger, and she’s still active, and will probably always be active and so conceivably she could be the first human to put her entire life online.
Lauren’s gift is not her body, or her attractive face, but rather her literary brain, as messed up as it is sometimes…
Her talent is manifest in her prose and her unique blog style. She floods the page with pictures and then packs little snippets of text in the gaps like mortar between photo bricks. In this way she dispenses information moment to moment, chronologically detailing her unique point of view and sharing intimate thoughts as they happened.
“When I started blogging I did it to lure men (for readers) because I thought only men would be interested in a girl’s bullshit… My entire brand is co-opted from Nerve.com breeding with VICE magazine’s tell-it-like-it-is style. When I mention Nerve I mean the boudoir sexy style of tease. I am a tease, a minx, a provocateur.”
After fifteen years, she has earned a grudging respect from her critics. “Raymi is more relevant now than ever,’ Lauren says, “And look out cause now she knows her audience.” Raymi the Minx on Instagram, and shes @RaymitheMinx on Twitter, and RaymiTheMinx on Facebook. Raymi the Minx is an early adopter of Ello. Simply by using these tools and posting comments about her life’s details, VIP media events, and status updates, she has accrued an engaged fan base of mostly older male followers. Today Raymi has her third book in the works, which I understand to be more than just another expose detailing the sexual adventures of her younger self, but either way, its sure to be hot stuff.